In answer to a post asking how the new edition will relate to the 1990 revised 3 volume edition, Peter wrote:
The short answer is implied in the last sentence of Boydell's blurb.
Vinaver was, in textual critical terms, an extreme conservative (his
views are regularly quoted in courses on editing as an eloquent
exposition of that view), and I found,
while revising his last 3-volume edition for the 1990 Clarendon Press Works of Sir Thomas Malory,
that I disagreed strongly with him on that. He didn't always stick to
his principles -- and thank goodness for that -- but he did sometimes,
and among
other things they required him to leave manifest error uncorrected if
he couldn't not only prove that the reading of his base text was
erroneous but also show how that error had come into being. And "prove"
meant prove -- in principle, an editor needed certainty,
not mere probability, before emending his base-text: in other words, he
was obliged to leave unaltered in his text readings he believed were
probably corrupt. I, however, thought an editor should (after
making the best allowance he could for his own inclination to believe
that a possible emendation was correct because it was awfully clever and
he'd thought of it) go with whatever he believed
was probable and see if the scholarly world agreed or thought he and
his edition should be dropped together into the Bog of Eternal Stench.
It was, however, impossible and would have been indecent for me to have
tried to subvert Vinaver's principles in his
own edition. There have also, since the last complete revision and
resetting of the
Works in 1967, been discoveries about the relationship between
the two primary Malory texts (the manuscript was in Caxton's
printing-shop, and got his ink on its pages), new discoveries about the
sources Malory used, better editions of the sources that
were already known, and invaluable research tools like concordances and
the completed
Middle English Dictionary. They weren't available to Vinaver,
they were available to me. Hence my edition gives over 2000 readings
different from those of the
Works: it also has a different title (Le Morte Darthur)
and a different layout, with a much cleaner page and no multi-page
breaks between sections to remind you just how fragmented Vinaver
thought Malory's book was. It will be in two volumes,
the text in one and what you might call the long answer -- it's about
as long as the text -- in the other. So if you want, you can just sit
down with Malory alone in Vol. I without distraction, and if you want
you can have both volumes open at the same time
and read my stuff in parallel with the text it's designed to support.
A paperback student edition consisting of just the text plus the
glossary from Vol. II is projected for some time in the future, but we
need to get the main event achieved before we can even think about a
date for that.
P. J. C. Field 26th September 2012
Arthurnet can be found at: http://www.arthuriana.org/arthurnet.htm
