The Ockham Dialogus
project has now been completed, after thirty years of work. This
also completes the Opera
politica project, after more than eighty years. (See
Miethke, Die
kritische Edition von William Ockhams Opera politica ist jetzt
abgeschlossen.) I
believe it can be said, without exaggeration, that the making of
a critical edition of Ockham's political writings has been one
of the most important undertakings in the study of medieval
European thought--in view of Ockham's high intelligence and the
boldness and originality of his thought, and in view of the
centrality to political and religious thinking of the
controversies in which he was involved.
Sometime shortly before World
War II a number of scholars (J.G. Sikes, B.L. Manning, R.F.
Bennett, H.S. Offler and R.H. Shape) set out to make a modern
critical edition of the Latin text of Ockham's Opera
Politica. (Opera politica was the name they chose
for the writings Ockham produced in support of the dissident
Franciscans' campaign to depose Popes John XXII, Benedict XII
and Clement VI; these writings involve discussion of many
topics of political philosophy.) The first volume, edited
by J.G. Sikes, was published in 1940 by Manchester University
Press. After the war Offler
and Bennett
returned to the project (Bennett not for long--he turned
to WWII
history, having played a key part in British
intelligence). Manchester UP brought out two more volumes (1956,
1963) and a second edition of the first
volume (1974), all three edited by H.S. Offler. The front
matter of Volume 3 gives an outline of the
project. Eight volumes were planned, of which volumes 5-8 would
contain the Dialogus. In 1997 Oxford University Press
for the British Academy published Volume 4, edited by H.S.
Offler, as number 14 in the series Auctores
Britannici Medii Aevi. Professor Offler had died in
1991, and the final preparation of Volume 4 was overseen by
Professor David Luscombe, chairman of the Medieval Texts
Editorial Committee of the British Academy.
Volume 4 completed all of the Opera Politica except for
the Dialogus. In the foreword to Volume 4 Professor
Luscombe announced that the Dialogus would be edited by
John Kilcullen in the Auctores series, that it would be
published electronically, and that it would include both Latin
text and English translation. He did not characterise the Dialogus
project as the continuation of the Opera politica
project, but in effect it was. The first editors of the Dialogus
project appointed by the Medieval Texts Editorial Committee
were John Kilcullen and John Scott. We were awarded a Australian
Research Council large 3-year grant 1994-, but it became clear
that the project was too big for two people. With the approval of
the Medieval Texts Committee, parts
of the project were assigned to other scholars: 1 Dial.
6 and 7 to George Knysh, 2 Dial. to Volker Leppin and Jan Ballweg,
and 3.2 Dial. to Karl Ubl and Semih Heinen. (The German
participants were supported by large grants from Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft and employed a number of research
assistants.) The editors did not form a committee; the project was
overseen by the Medieval Texts Committee. The editorial
policy was worked out by the editors and approved by the
Medieval Texts Committee.
Given that none
of the editors had any authority over the others, there might be
a question whether we have produced a coherent edition. Some
degree of heterogeneity is appropriate,
since Ockham wrote the Dialogus in stages over some 20
years, and in different manuscripts and different sections of a
manuscript there are differences in the exemplars and in degree
of “contamination”. Given these circumstances, I believe that
the outcome of our work is well unified. (For my examination of
this issue see Coherence.html.)
Development of
the website
With
the cooperation of the British Academy we set up and
maintained a Dialogus
website from 1995 (which was just a few years after
the establishment of the World Wide Web – we were pioneers in
using the Web for a humanities research project). The first
ARC research grant paid for Dr Christine Asmar to type into a
computer the approx. 500,000 words of the text in the 17th century Goldast
edition: quite an undertaking, which she did well. We posted
her files on the website and gradually amended them as we read
the manuscripts. These files, as amended, were the basis of
all the volumes. The website went through many updates (see chronology).
There were a
number of reasons for putting the project on the World Wide Web.
(1) The British Academy at first seemed to consider the
possibility of publishing the Dialogus only
electronically and not in print. (Maybe they were waiting to see
how it went.) (2) We thought we might get feedback and
suggestions from other students of Ockham. (I don’t think we
ever got any.) (3) We wanted to make our work available to
others without waiting for print publication. (In fact it was
used, e.g. an Italian
translation was based on the
web text.) (4) We realised that we might not live to complete
the project, and wanted to make it easy for someone else to go
on from where we were at. (5) Web publication was a way of
keeping the British Academy, the Australian Research Council and
Macquarie University informed about the progress of a long
project.
In addition, the
website was a forum in which the editors could think through
various problems, e.g. to characterise the manuscripts and to
work out progressively our view of the relationships among them
(see here, here).
The website was also a means of publishing worthwhile material
that would have added too much bulk to printed volumes, e.g. here, here,
and here.
Hyperlinks enhanced the usefulness of some studies, e.g. here,
and helped readers
follow Ockham's many cross-references. From the
beginning we intended to make an English translation of the
whole work (Offler’s generation of scholars saw no need for
translation, but these days translations are necessary if
younger scholars are to see the value of learning Latin -- we
have also translated Breviloquium, LFM and other Writings, and OND
vol.1 and OND
vol.2.); much of the translation of the Dialogus will be
left on the web (here)
and not printed. (English translation of the first sections of
the Dialogus has been printed in the Auctores series, vol.43.)
Printed volumes
The Opera
Politica volumes published by Manchester UP were numbered
in their place in the series even though they were published in
a different order (Vol. III before II). In the Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi series
the Dialogus volumes are numbered in the order of
publication in the series, an order that does not correspond to
their place in the Dialogus; readers may find this
confusing – hence “The Dialogus at a Glance” (included
facing the title page in several of the volumes, e.g. vol.
35), which was inserted at Luscombe’s
suggestion. The ordering of publication was not the result of
any group decision. The
volumes were numbered as they were published, and they were
published in the order in which the editors happened to finish
their respective volumes. Scott and I reworked the edition of 2
Dial. prepared by Jan Ballweg (with his agreement). We had by
then made considerable progress on 1 Dial.1-5 and on 3.1 and 3.2
Dial. (we had 3.2 Dial. well advanced, starting from Scott’s
analysis of its text tradition), but re-working 2 Dial. made a big
interruption. When we were satisfied with 2 Dial. we published
it together with 3.1 Dial. as vol.
20, and then went back to work on 1
Dial. 1-5. That volume took a lot longer than we expected
because of the complexities of the manuscript tradition (see vol.
35, pp.xix-xxx – those pages record a
lot of work!). As we worked on 1 Dial. 1-5, we realised we might
well be dead before we could revise our draft of 3.2, so we
asked Ubl to take over 3.2 Dial. Ubl and Heinen and their team
produced vol.
33 quickly, while Scott and I were
still working on 1 Dial. 1-5, which was published a year later as vol.
35. Knysh, who had been
working on 1 Dial. 6 and 7, published when he was ready (vol.
41, vol.
42), which happened to be at the end
of the Latin series. Then Scott and I finished our English
translation of the text published in vol.
35 and published that as vol.43.
Over the 30 years
the Dialogus project took we had to deal with various
changes of technology.
At first we
worked from microfilms, parts of which we printed; later we
scanned the microfilms to get .pdf or .tif images; only recently
have some manuscripts become available in digitised form, some
of them now available on the Web (Ce,
Fi,
Fr,
etc.)
Recording
variants from many manuscripts produced a large data base that
had to be managed through changes of methods and software. At
first we entered variants in brackets into the files typed from
the Goldast text, like this (search to
"volo hic"). When we decided to use Collate, we
used a VBA procedure to
extract from these Goldast text files, containing variants from many
manuscripts, a “witness file” for each manuscript, showing the
text as it appeared in that manuscript. We also used VBA to edit
the collations that “Collate” produced so as to move rejected
variants to the right (after a semicolon) and to colour them by
family, so as to exhibit family relationships (and how some MSS
occasionally differ from their usual family), e.g. here. On the suggestion
of Peter Robinson,
the developer of “Collate”, we tried using PAUP to analyse manuscript
relationships; see here and
here.
PAUP rapidly tried thousands of possible stemmata but ended up
with something close to what we had decided on without its help.
To get high quality results PAUP requires assignment of degrees
of significance to variants: by the time we had done that we
would already have known the result, so we did not continue to
experiment with PAUP. (The
preceding paragraph relates to work on volumes 20 and 35.)
For preparing
volumes for print, at first we used Critical Edition Typesetter. When Classical Text Editor became available we used a VBA
procedure to turn CET files into MS Word files with specially
formatted footnotes,
files that could be imported into CTE. See DialArchive for
the various documents and procedures written to assist the
various transitions in technology.
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