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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture I reviewed the 2nd ed. of NCE, & the failure to mark different stages of contribution (original etc.) did not bother me then. But I got a testy message from someone who had been in a meeting in which the publisher made a promise of comp;lete revision. In retrospect, some tagging would have been useful, but it does not prevent my using the review copy sitting here within easy reach. My problem with NCE lies in completeness. It misses people, like Arnulf of Beauvais. For them I go to Lexikon fur Theologie und Kirche, now in 2nd ed. I use both editions, because the second has dropped some things now in the first. Tom Izbicki Thomas Izbicki Research Services Librarian and Gifts-in-Kind Officer Eisenhower Library Johns Hopkins Baltimore, MD 21218 (410)516-7173 fax (410)516-8399 >>> [log in to unmask] 01/29/06 4:18 AM >>> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture Paul Chandler wrote astutely of the problems of assessing and using older material, and continued, about the online version of the 1913 _Catholic Encyclopedia_: > Also I must say--with all delicacy--that I don't find it reasuring that > the net version was subject to "revisions and a going-over by the people > working on the articles". If this is so, it does not seem to be > well-explained at the New Advent website, which as far as I can see > refers to its source for the encyclopedia simply as the 1913 edition. > Doesn't unacknowledged revision compromise the electronic CE as a > version of this historic encyclopedia, without really offering assurance > that the updating is done at a level of competence similar to the original? In my opinion, yes, it does. The problem of the authenticity and authority of materials is not helped by invisible emendation by a self-appointed editorial presence. For serious work, one is driven, if relying on the online version, to compare it with the printed volume. I would not object to appending new material, or reconsiderations, including corrections of fact with citation of sources, to the original text. Since there is little commercial value, if any, in the online version, one wonders just what is the purpose of unheralded revision? > > Thomson-Gale, in my opinion, made a hash of its 2nd edition of the New > Catholic Encyclopedia (2002) by creating uncertainty of a similar kind: > some articles are entirely new, some are revised by the author, some by > another, some have additions, some have new bibliographies, some have > the bibliographies of 40 years ago, some now have bibliographies which > are not the basis of the article to which they are appended, and it is > rather difficult to know which are which. Indeed; here, I suspect the NCE has fallen victim to commercial realities; maybe the original intentions of revision proved impossible of achievement within the limits of the publisher's readiness to support it? In other words, it may have turned out there was too much that had to be done. I agree with Paul, from comparison of the two editions, that the revised edition is very disappointing. > > Frans van Liere wrote: > >> And speaking of Migne, maybe Tom knows more about this. The booklet >> "God's Plagiarist" I referred to earlier gives a revealing insight into >> Migne's methods. And some of the editions in there are actually very >> good critical editions that were made for his edition in the >> mid-nineteenth century. (Not that any of his "modern" editors ever >> received any credit for this work...). But some are actually very shoddy >> nineteenth-century editions, and some are seventeenth-century editions, >> or even older. Again: know what you're looking at! Here I suspect we're victimes of the change of scholarly style, so to speak: intensive study of particular texts, in their original languages, including their textual state and the occasional significant difficulties of translation, seems to have gone out of fashion. The virtues of one editorial text (and of one translation, beyond questions of readability to the modern eye) over another don't often seem to be part of the substance of courses in church history. Hal Cain Joint Theological Library Parkville, Victoria, Australia [log in to unmask] -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. 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