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Elizabeth Jeffreys

you wish) which can be revealed, unveiled or reconstructed.40 The remarks in the last
several paragraphs are reacting to developments, of which most readers of this volume
will be well aware, that are leading towards a more nuanced understanding of medieval
attitudes to authorship. The question to be asked is whether these evolving attitudes
have any impact on approaches to a critical edition of a text of Malalas. Lachmannian
stemmata41 are not now fashionable. In fact, they rarely work in their idealised format,
although they do have their uses when a text’s transmission path is restricted and
there is no evidence of contamination. Nevertheless, even in more confused situations,
general patterns of relationship between groups of manuscripts can often be discerned,
and then details refined by other criteria. Thus one still finds stemmata accompanying
texts in the Corpus Fontium series; a recent complex example can be found in Staffan
Wahlgren’s edition of Symeon Logothetes.42 In the case of Malalas, Thurn’s edition
presents a somewhat simplistic schema43 while the Australian collection of studies on
Malalas slid round the issues by presenting a chronological listing only.44 Approaches
to editorial practices have, of course, passed through stormy waters in the last two or
three decades, with authors declared dead or non-existent and internecine warfare over
literary theory taking place in departments of English and Modern Languages, if not
of Classics and History. The avant garde enthusiasts of the 1970s are now beginning to
look back in amazement at the editorial philosophies that were sequentially espoused
with such vehemence: there is, for example, a rather touching apology by David Gree-
tham in the issue of Textual Cultures for 2008 for the swiftly developing fashions of
the 1970s and 1980s in which he was a major player.45 Due to its customary belatedness
and reluctance to problematize theoretical stances, most of this has passed by most
branches of Byzantine Studies. Admittedly much of the problematization is irrelevant
to the problems facing editors of manuscript material, whatever the language in ques-
tion, and has been prompted by the editing of nineteenth-century English-language
poets and novelists, that is, authors functioning in a print culture.46 Wherever, as far
as I can see, issues have washed over into Byzantine studies these concern practical
matters, such as attitudes to collation (whether or not to use an electronic text editor),
whilst there has been an enthusiastic welcome for all the other electronic aids such as
digitised manuscripts and the endless riches of the TLG. Perhaps the most striking
issue in editorial theory to have emerged in Byzantine Studies has been the impact of
attitudes towards accidentals’. The question of accidentals’formed a major element in
discussions of editorial procedures involving nineteenth-century printings, and refers
40 For discussions on the treatment of texts in an area of Byzantine literature (not including chronicles)
where multiple manuscript witnesses lead to multiple variants, see Eideneier/Moennig/Τουφεξής,
Θεωρία και πράξη των εκδόσεων.
4ΐ The classic statement, in the English-speaking world at least, is West, Textual Criticism.
42 Symeon, Chronicon, ed. Wahlgren, p. 139*.
43 Malalas, Chronographia, ed. Thurn, p. 16*.
44 Jeffreys/Croke/Scott, “Transmission of Malalas”, p. 311.
45 Greetham, “Uncoupled”.
46 See, e.g. Tanselle, Textual Criticism.