kairos wrote:
My take Gee is being slammed down for his petty remarks about transcription, though Jensen gives him kudos for his research and scholarship over the years on the Book of Abraham. Let's see if he can survive, even some board members there call Gee's previous scholarship "problematic".
I
almost have sympathy with what Gee's complaints appear to be. But an important distinction that he muddies here is between a diplomatic edition and a critical text. A diplomatic edition transcribes a manuscript into something workable for people who aren't experts at reading a manuscript or not able to consult it directly. Manuscripts, obviously, can contain errors, and diplomatic editions usually transcribe the errors. A critical text is something more than that, or at least different from it: an editor's best judgment not about what the manuscript contains but what the author intended the manuscript to contain when s/he/ze/zir/WTF-pronoun-you-want wrote it or had it written down. Therefore, a diplomatic edition should reproduce spelling errors, whereas a critically edited text usually doesn't except for very particular and often arguable reasons (e.g. some classical philologists have a romantic affinity for the lunate sigma in Greek texts, whereas I think if you're gonna go that route, you might as well dispense with accents, punctuation, and spaces between words). My impression is that the volumes of the JSP project are primarily diplomatic editions that are meant to put the manuscripts in published form, not critical editions in strict sense, but at the same time they are to be legible to the public interested in Mormonism, not specialists in 19th century orthography. From what I can gather, this volume is mostly a diplomatic edition.
Gee faults the editors for:
1) indicating points of doubt and suspending final judgment. That is an unfair criticism for a diplomatic edition; for a critical edition, a textual critic should exercise judgment and make a decision except in the most hopeless cases. For a diplomatic edition, it is better to leave doubtful instances as they are; textual critics will then go and make their educated guesses. Gee is thus faulting them for not doing a critical text.
2) regularizing spelling. A textual critic will generally do that unless there is a compelling interest not to (e.g. there was no regularized spelling when the
text, not the manuscript, was first composed). There was regularized spelling in the 1830s and 1840s, and since this volume is not for historians of English orthography or linguists specializing in dialects but rather for Mormons and people interested in Mormonism, it's maybe not that objectionable to regularize the spelling in some instances. I wouldn't have wanted it that way in a diplomatic edition, but I can see why some would in this context. Gee's objection here, though, is that the editors were not doing a diplomatic edition.
In sum: he faults them for
not acting as textual critics rather than editors of a diplomatic text, and then he faults them for doing just that.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie