Interweave 4: N ormalisation/Challenges in Editing H o ccle
David Greetham · 2013
The substance of the conflated essays now confronts the range of textual, bibliographical, and linguistic problems that the scholarly edition of Hoccleve&s;s Regement of Princes had to deal with. For the audience of medievalists, as the title "Challenges" suggests, I surveyed the options currently available to scholarly editors in responding to the typical documentary conditions of late medieval literature: multiple scribal copies but no authorial manuscripts. The challenge was to take advantage of the peculiar paradox referred to in the 5B essay: whi le the Regement is indeed documentarily similar to several other important late Middle English works (The Canterbury Tales, the Confessio Amantis, Piers Plowman) in surviving in multiple scribal witnesses but without a holograph, the evidence to be drawn from H occleve&s;s complete documentary oeuvre is very different from that of any other of his contemporaries. A scribe himself (including stints on Chaucer), H ocdeve seems to have undertaken the production of a "collected works" of his own poetry, in that virtually all of his "minor" poems do survive in holograph. This fact is, in itself, sufficiently unusual to provoke a challenge to the editing of the Regement: briefly put, it demands that we decide whether the usage discoverable from an analysis of these holographs can or ought to be considered in the editing of the non-holograph Regement. But what renders this challenge even more provocative is that a computer analysis of the morphology of the holographs demonstrates that, as scribe and author, Hocdeve appears to have been striving for a high degree of stylistic uniformity in his writing. Is it proper to imporr the features of this attempted uniformity into the editing of the (scribal) accidentals of the Regement?