Contextual Duplicity and Textual Variation: The Siren and Onocentaur in the Physiologus Tradition

It is chiefly in the treatment of manuscript variation that approaches toward the editing of ancient and medieval texts diverge. On the one hand, there are methods of textual criticism that lead to the editorial fashioning of authoritative, standardized, or reconstructed texts. Such methods have at their heart certain presuppositions about why copyists and translators might have deviated from their exemplars, and each of these presuppositions is sound, if not always valid. On the basis of internal manuscript evidence, scribal inconsistency has been attributed to unintentional physical lapses (omission, dittography, haplology, orthographic confusion), or intentional alteration (correction, interpolation, deletion, tendentious manipulation), among other things. After an examination of external manuscript evidence, which yields information about the number and age of the witnesses, such editorial guidelines emerge as brevior lectio probabilior and difficilior lectio potior, and choices are made that result in a critically established text. On the other hand, there are proponents of "new" and materialist philology who regard textual variation as a defining feature of manuscript culture and thus endorse the synchronic evaluation of manuscripts as textual and cultural monuments of equal value. Products of such thinking, namely diplomatic editions (which have a long history), gain and lose popularity according to disciplinary trends. The aim of the present study is to propose a synthetic approach toward a particular type of textual instability that is both sensitive to local manuscript cultures and yet capable of surmising an archetypal stimulation for manuscript variation. The type of instability in mind might be called context-based variation, and an argument for its existence can be made most convincingly in light of evidence drawn from broadly disseminated textual traditions. The example presented below will concern the siren and onocentaur in the many versions of the Physiologus that were produced before the middle of the thirteenth century.