7. Thoughts on Scholarly Editing

Abstract

Paul Eggert’s Securing the Past is a monograph bracketing analyses of conservation in architecture, art, and literature.¹ The book’s interest is in fields of force operative between the poles of origin as creative authorship, on the one hand, and of the cultural techniques of preservation, restoration, and editing, on the other. At bottom, Eggert sees these activities as one common enterprise predicated on two essentials. One of them is ‘agency’, the term under which are subsumed and progressively theorised both originating authorship and the refashioning, even recreation, of cultural objects as they travel through time. The other, and concurrent, essential