University of St Andrews

How many errors are there in medieval texts? As modern readers, we are used to a relatively tidy and user-friendly reading experience. It seems to be the modern editor's job to reconstruct correct texts, and we assume that this can be done by editing out errors which arose in the transmission of a text. Another assumption is that the medieval authors themselves originally produced text free of errors. Whether those assumptions are valid will be one of the topics of my talk. I would like to chart the errors and textual difficulties in the ninth-century Old English Martyrology, to hightlight the peculiar nature of this text and the tasks faced by its editors, but also to give an example of how omnipresent error can be in a medieval text.