Abstract

This article finds itself at the intersection of editorial theory and the practicalities of editing medieval material. Preparing any edition will start with the most fundamental query – before we can decide how to edit, we need to decide on what material it is that should be edited. In a textual tradition where rewriting and emending, borrowing and copying from other works was part of the process of writing and even of reading, and in a time before our modern notions of authorship came into being, where does a given medieval work begin? Where does it cease to be one work and become another? Where do we start editing, and where do we stop? With medieval works, these are often not straightforward questions to answer. I will use as a case study my 2018 digital edition of the Crónica particular de San Fernando (CPSF), usually considered a fourteenth-century post-Alfonsine chronicle (referring to Alfonso X of Castile and Leon, r.1252-1284). Despite a significant section of the CPSF being written in the century after Alfonso’s death, this chronicle is often, perhaps confusingly, also considered to be part of the Estoria de Espanna, an unfinished thirteenth-century history attributed to Alfonso X. Part of it is definitely is the Estoria de Espanna, but part of it is stylistically and ideologically post- Alfonsine. The CPSF appears in some witnesses of the Estoria de Espanna, but not others. Sometimes it appears as part of other chronicles, and sometimes it is a standalone chronicle in its own right. It doesn’t even always start at the same point. So how should we edit it? How can we decide where this chronicle begins? Editorial choices always need to be underpinned theoretically, but this paper re-examines the usefulness or validity of some of our theoretical notions of work in relation to medieval material, and considers some examples of where the practicalities of editing ask us to revisit or review these theoretical notions