Martos, Josep Lluís ed., «Les proses mitològiques de Joan Roís de Corella; edició crítica». Biblioteca Sanchis Guarner 55. València: IIFV; Barcelona: PAM, 2001, 477 pp. [Ressenya]

Curt J. Wittlin

This book is now the definitive edition for nine texts from the pen of the great fifteenth-century Valencian master of refined prose, Corella. It replaces the edition of twenty texts offered in 1913 by Miquel i Planas in his Obres de J. Roiç de Corella, volume in certain semiotic and esthetic aspects still unsurpassed. (The facsimile of the Maians manuscript issued in 1984 in Valencia by the company DEL CENIA AL SEGURA remains, of course, very useful.) This new partial edition of Corella ―Martos promises to publish yet more works―, is justified mostly by the discovery of the superior Cambridge manuscript, which contains five of these nine texts. In his «Estudi Preliminar» (21-104), Martos does not describe the four preserved manuscripts, limiting himself to refer the reader to studies which have appeared in four different places. However, his chapter «Els manuscrits i la seua llengua», (followed by a critical list of the «Edicions anteriors», which complements a general survey of secondary literature) describes in detail the differences in spelling, phonetics and grammar between the four manuscripts. With a profusion of examples (synoptic columns might have been helpful), we learn, for instance, that «el Cançoner de Maians i el Còdex de Cambridge... perden regularment [z] (in forms like bellea, vellea, flaquea)... mentre que el Jardinet d'orats i el Cançoner de Barberà la mantenen regularment (belesa, vellesa, flaquesa)». (By the way: Why does Martos ―who introduced the abbreviation Am. for Amors― not use the sigla C, V, J, D for the four manuscripts, but repeats dozens of times their full names?) Since they do so «regularment», one wonders why the critical apparatus still registers each and every single case. Many other spelling differences are just as regular, and the listing of them in the introduction, with examples, would justify, in my opinion, their omission in the critical apparatus, much too detailed, and unlikely to be read by anyone in conjunction with the text. For instance, Medea's letter fills 29 pages of text (207-36); after deducing the space used by 42 footnotes, we are left with exactly as many pages as are taken up by the critical apparatus (307-417). Over 130 lines in the apparatus are of the type: «scriu: escriu V». Then there are dozens of cases for each of the regular differences between mss C and V such as «Jàson: Jèson», the ending of nouns «-tud» versus «-tut», the spelling «-ex-» versus «-eix-», or «-mp-» versus «-np-», the verb «deixar» or «leixar», the use of h to show hiatus, etc., etc., etc. Nothing of all this is needed by the reader, well informed of these facts already in the introduction; and the philologist loses patience having to go through a haystack to find interesting needles, such as «tart: poch V», or «poqua ilia: petita ylla V». The impatience becomes irritation if, comparing text and apparatus in two different places in the book, one finds listings of minor mistakes made, and corrected right away, by the copyist of the secondary manuscript: «aprés: p aprés V».

I went to some length about this criticism ―which applies also to many other recent editions of medieval texts which were doctoral dissertations― because I wonder if it had not been possible to save enough space in this volume to make it unnecessary to publish the other half of Marco's thesis as a separate book, with the title Fonts i seqüència cronològica de les proses mitològiques de Joan Roís de Corella, Biblioteca de Filologia Catalana 10, U d'Alacant, 2002 (which I have not seen). Two chapters in the introduction of the edition summarize materials published in full in that other book. It is understandable that a doctorand with a bulky thesis likes the idea of getting two books out of it, without having to trim the cumbersome critical apparatus (which must have required uncountable hours of drudgery), or having to rewrite the material which now fills the second book so that it could have been used in the introduction to the edition.

«Definitive edition» was how I described Martos' job in the first sentence of this review. All my criticisms do not undermine this judgment of the edition, admirable also for its footnotes to the text, most of which concern mythology, sources, or influence on Martorell's Tirant lo Blanc. What I regret is that Martos' work has been split into two books, published in different series; and that the main reason for doing so was the belief that the public wants "critical editions", supreme title of nobility which can only by attained by an exhaustive critical apparatus, of the same length as the author's text. This fetishism of spelling variants or scribal errors is the culprit that we now have to wait for several volumes to get the new complete works of Corella, that it takes a century (or two?) to print the complete works of Eiximenis, that we still don't have editions of some of the most common medieval texts (such as Fray Laurent's On Vices and Virtues), and that there is a reluctance among young philologists to engage in editing medieval manuscripts if they have to do so "the old way", believing that it is enough to put photographs of manuscripts, or diplomatic transcriptions, on a webpage. I would agree with them if they would use the time saved by not having to compile a traditional critical apparatus to study the manuscripts, the copyists and their spelling idiosyncracies, the author, the text. Martos, having done all this in addition to the app. crit., with admirable results, will be praised by "oldfashioned" scholars, but will not be able to counter the arguments of the "new philologists", who will probably soon find a way to combine in a satisfactory way modern technology ―facsimiles, concordances, machine-readable texts, etc.― on a website, with the old medium of a traditional, annotated edition (in regularized spelling), with a glossary and an introduction written for a wide audience..., adding, maybe, an illustration or two.