Rant on research; was, Re: [Sca-cooks] Re: Coffyns

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Bill Fisher:
>On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 16:28:08 -0500, Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
><adamantius.magister at verizon.net> wrote:
>ove of extremism ;-). On
>>  the other hand, for example, the paperback edition of, say, Millham's
>>  translation of Platina, which does not (IIRC) include the original
>>  Latin text, is clearly and demonstrably not as good as the hardcover
>>  edition, which does. If that makes me an evil decryer/critic of
>>  secondary sources, so be it, but I prefer to see it as a preference
>
>Well, that's a bad and good example.  The latin facing pages are a
>re-written  averaging of several manuscript versions together
>and fixing the latin so that it can be read.  Says so in the
>Scriptorum in the beginning part of the book.  (Page 59). 
>
>So what you are seeing is an aggregated and corrected
>latin version, and an english translation for that.
>
>It doesn't make invalid though because
>Milham states in the footnotes which manuscripts the various
>parts come from in each section and even what sources
>Platina is copying from.  Compound that with the fact that
>no autograph copy of this exists in Platina's hand. 
>(my theory was that  seeing as he was the vatican librarian,
>he probably passed the work off to a scribe to clean up his
>in prison edition)
>
>The bad part is that it isn't all Platina's latin.  The good part is
>that Milham is very precise in her documentation as to which
>sources she is pulling from, what changes she has made,
>even to the extent of the differences in the various manuscripts.
>
>I'll still use it as a primary source though.

Yep; she goes to a lot of trouble to present a readable Latin text, 
so if you have any questions about why she presents the English text 
as she does, you can check it against the Latin, even if the Latin is 
a concordance/synthesis of several manuscripts (Scully does this, 
too).

But my point was that it's hard to argue this as a bad thing, even if 
don't choose or need to rely on it, it's good to have. Not having 
access to it doesn't make an English-only version bad, but having it 
is probably better than not having it, in that it limits your options 
to a lesser extent.

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

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