The Archival View of Technology: Resources for the Scholar of the Future - new approaches are needed by archivists who work with electronic information - author abstract

Library Trends, Spring, 1999 by David S. Zeidberg

TRADITIONAL RESOURCES AND TRADITIONAL SCHOLARSHIP

Since the invention of writing, human beings have not only recorded information and ideas they thought important but have attempted to save that information as well. Early documentation was mostly practical, but developed toward historical perspective--records of harvests; the exchange of goods; the lineage of a family; the chronicle of a monarchy, society, or culture. Literary records, begun in an oral-formulaic tradition, came later. Throughout the history of the written word, people serving in roles equivalent to our modern concept of librarians and archivists have attempted to preserve, arrange, and describe these original documents, not only to save the ideas they contain but also to keep some sense of the process of creating those ideas. Scholars seek out these documents, even if they have been published, to see them "first-hand" and to understand how they were created. Original documents hold physical evidence that transcends the ideas that the words, sentences, and paragraphs contain.

The best scholarship in the humanities still emanates from documentary research. Textual transmission plays a key role in determining the accuracy of a resource, and corruption from one transmission to the next --as manuscripts are copied, as different editions are set in type, as editors make unfounded decisions--can produce texts far from the author's original intentions. One example of textual corruption concerns the printing of Archimedes's works. The first two editions appeared in Venice and Basel in 1543 and 1544 respectively. The printers based their texts on manuscripts available to them. These manuscripts, it turned out, were far from the texts Archimedes is thought to have left when he died in 212 B.C. Federico Commandino, an extraordinary Renaissance scholar of physics and mathematics, found the printed texts troubling and set about to produce a new edition around 1550.

Commandino accomplished the textual restoration through his understanding of classical Greek, and, more importantly, through his grasp of the process by which the texts had been transmitted from one manuscript to the next from Archimedes's time through the Roman and Byzantine periods to the Renaissance, and with translation into Latin as well along the way. Beginning in the Hellenistic period, scholars would add glosses of difficult words in the text, called lemmas, along with commentaries, called scholia (see Grafton, 1997, p. 157ff., for an explanation of this process and its effect upon original texts). Commandino was able to work back through the scholia and lemmas of the two contemporary printed editions and earlier manuscripts, making corrections and, in some cases, eliminating erroneous glosses altogether. Paolo Manuzio printed and published the results of Commandino's restoration of the Archimedes text in 1558, and that edition remained definitive--the one from which all subsequent editions were published--through the nineteenth century.

Sound textual scholarship produces definitive editions, and sometimes the impact of those editions can change the world. Perhaps the most far-reaching example in Western culture occurred in the first half of the sixteenth century during the Reformation. Martin Luther's 1517 publication of his ninety-five theses against the sale of indulgences may be the best remembered "document" of the Reformation, but biblical scholarship both within and outside the church probably had more long-lasting effect on the movement. Humanist scholars, such as Luther, Desiderius Erasmus, and William Tyndale worked on new translations of the Bible while Cardinal Ximenes worked a more subtly presented new translation into a new polyglot Bible in Alcala, Spain. At issue was the accuracy of the existing Latin Vulgate, Jerome's fourth century translation from the original Hebrew and Greek, which had remained the official Catholic version for a thousand years. David Daniell (1994) writes: "Though limited and in places misleading and inaccurate, it was powerfully defended; attempts to restore knowledge of the texts, the Greek of the new Testament and the Hebrew of the Old, were usually branded as heresy" (p. 4).

Erasmus led the way in 1516 with his Novum instrumentum, a new Latin translation of the New Testament printed in parallel to the original Greek text. While Erasmus's intention was to "correct the Vulgate" as Daniell observes, having his translation printed next to the Greek from which it was made gave a more scholarly than political tone to the product. Luther's 1522 German translation and Tyndale's English version of 1526 were more polemically driven editions, made in defiance of the church, that aimed at putting accurate vernacular versions of the Bible in the hands of lay people. Indeed, for his efforts, Tyndale was eventually captured in 1535, tried and imprisoned, and burned as a heretic in 1536.

Within the Catholic church, at the time Erasmus was producing his New Testament translation, Cardinal Ximenes was directing a team of scholars to produce the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, which eventually appeared in 1522. Across a single page, one could now find the original Old Testament Hebrew, the Greek translation of the Hebrew, Jerome's Vulgate, Aramaic commentaries on the Hebrew and, perhaps most important, a new Latin translation. Like Erasmus, the intent was to present the latest textual scholarship that "allowed the Vulgate to be challenged, and advanced understanding of the original texts" (Daniell, 1994, p. 10). In all these examples, the fact that these scholars could retrace the steps by which the source documents were created afforded them the opportunity to make more sound interpretations of what they read.