 |
 |
Anyone else who has taken part in the discussion on the mediaeval group Interscripta knows that I am somewhat baffled by applications of literary theory (or theory drawn from other social sciences) to what appear to me to be primarily historical problems. That may be part of my difficulty with discussions of theory in regards to records research but not, I hope, entirely. I also have to confess that my own training has not at any point been literary but either linguistic or historical, and in fact, a fairly old-fashioned type of historical training. It has never seemed to me that making primary sources available for research purposes was an activity which required a theoretical justification. At the risk of being dismissed as a simple positivist yet again, I want to distinguish two things which we are, it seems to me, confusing here. First is the methodology which we (using 'we' very broadly to mean the whole panoply of field editors and REED staff) use to decide what specific documents or excerpts from documents to collect, transcribe, edit, and publish in REED volumes. I think there is no shame in the fact that that methodology has developed in pragmatic ways since we began this enterprise. We strive to continue to articulate and refine it, not just in the now-itself-somewhat-historic REED Handbook but collection by collection in the editorial procedures section of the introduction, in which each individual editor tries to describe his or her 'take' on the REED guidelines and the specific situation which records survival and local history together presented. So long as we continue to clearly define what has been done and what has not been done and why, I personally see little need to inform this process theoretically, as opposed to codicologically! But what use you as students of theatre history or local history or mediaeval or renaissance studies make of the REED collections is a very different matter. That is where theory and a critical underpinning seems most necessary. What you need from us is, I think, clearly-defined editorial practices and principles of selection so that you can make use of the documentary evidence illuminated and guided by theory and historiography. Ideally the collections will also provide a guide and finding aid for further and more detailed work with specific manuscripts. REED's selections of ecclesiatical court cases can tell you a lot about types of activity and even patterns of activity in specific places at specific time, but if you want to place that activity within a wider social context, you need to study the court books in full and in a different way. It would not be reasonable to expect REED to print a calendar of all the contents of every court book from which we printed cases, though. To continue to use Naomi's image: butterfly collecting is a necessary preliminary to some kinds of entymology and evolutionary studies, but heaven help the scientist who doesn't bring a deep and informed knowledge of modern biology and evolutionary theory to bear on studying that collection or who doesn't go beyond it. Abigail Records of Early English Drama/ Victoria College/ 150 Charles Street W Toronto Ontario Canada Phone (416) 585-4504/FAX (416) [log in to unmask] http://www.epas.utoronto.ca:8080/~reed/reed.html => REED's home page http://www.epas.utoronto.ca:8080/~reed/reed-l.html => REED-L's home page