Feist II (Son of Feist?)

Many thanks to everyone who answered my query about the US Supreme Court judgement "Feist vs. Rural Telephone." I am now fairly clear about the case as it applies to telephone directories.

My problem is that a U.S. publisher wishes to apply it to critical editions of medieval Latin texts which we have published.

To prepare a critical edition, the editor must not only search out numerous Latin copies, generally in European libraries, but collate them. The editor (1) must expand all Latin abbreviations (and the texts are highly abbreviated) in a form which makes linguistic and grammatical sense; (2) choose between alternate versions (since the copies can different quite significantly) to determine (in the editor's mind) what the original author actually wrote. There is considerable skill involved in these steps, and a great deal of judgement based on years of academic training. While the final text can be separated from the apparatus and notes (which list rejected readings) there is no proof that the final text actually was the one the original author wrote. It could be a version which never existed in the Middle Ages and exists in this format only in the late 20th-century, although obviously derived from earlier material.

What are your comments on this scenario in terms of Feist. The original text is not "fact", or if it is it is unascertainable. The copies are often corrupt (full of errors or deliberate changes by later scribes/editors). The edition we publish requires the extensive intervention of a thinking editor and is more than just a "copy" of what was "published", i.e. made public by scribes, earlier. In fact, if I copied out the original manuscript, with its errors and abbreviations, it would be virtually unintelligible.

Ron B. Thomson
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Toronto Canada
thomson[_at_]epas.utoronto.ca Received on Tue Oct 31 1995 - 14:47:41 GMT