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Carlos Alvar and José Manuel Lucía Megías, eds., Diccionario filológico de literatura medieval española. Textos y transmission. Madrid: Castalia, 2002 (Nueva biblioteca de erudición y crítica). 1178 pp. ISBN 84-9740-0186. 93 EUR.
Classical Greek and Latín texts have been submitted to a constant barrage of textual criticism. The same cannot be said of medieval Spanish texts, which philologists have made only timid and rather limited or onesided attempts to study. When Alberto Blecua's Manual de crítica textual was published in 1983, it was the first theoretical and practical endeavour to regulate the application of philological criteria to the study of Spanish texts. His book was the sequel to an initiative undertaken two years earlier by Incipit, which was then the only journal entirely devoted to questions concerning critical editions and textual transmission in Spanish. But despite the importance of these two publications, which set the foundations for textual criticism in Spanish, Hispanists were at first reluctant to apply these concepts. In fact, the concepts were not widely employed until the 1990s, when a whole series of handbooks, scholarly articles and critical studies on specific texts were finally published, in a sudden burst of critical activity. These publications included work by Blecua himself, Orduna, Pérez Priego and Sánchez Prieto, among others.
The Diccionario filológico de literatura medieval española puts together the results of research published in the numerous manuals and critical studies that have appeared over the intervening years. But in addition to gathering together the philological expertise of those working in the field, the book presents exhaustive and fully documented data of its own. The volume in fact gives an account of the textual tradition of almost three hundred medieval literary texts, chronicles and historiographical works, as testified by approximately one thousand five hundred witnesses. That is to say, the Diccionario brings to fulfilment all the individual contributions previously published on questions concerning the study of medieval texts. In this monumental task, editors Carlos Alvar and José Manuel Lucía Megías have been assisted by seventy international specialists in the field of Spanish medieval literature.
The Diccionario is made up of preliminary texts (general index to the volume, foreword and general bibliography), the dictionary itself and, finally, documentary material and indices included in appendices.
The introduction...