I like some documentaries about archaeology. And I'm very, very much interested in ancient and Medieval texts. And so, when in a well-made film on an archaeological topic, the host takes a break from the digs to go to a library's special collection and show us some old manuscripts, I tend to like it very much indeed.
But still, I think it could be done better. Let's take, for example, one of my favorite archaeological series, In Search of the Dark Ages, written and hosted (or presented, as they say in British English) by Michael Wood and first broadcast on the BBC in the late 1970's and early 1980's. This series, for the most part, covers the Anglo-Saxon period in England and the adjoining Celtic part of Britain. One episode goes earlier, having to to do with the first-century revolt of the British queen Boudica against the Romans.
Woods walks around historic sites, talking to archaeologists who are supervising digs, or led digs a a while ago, or want to get permission to begin digs, and asks them intelligent questions. Or he walks around historic sites by himself and speaks intelligently to the camera. Occasionally making allusions to current political events which sometimes make me wince with their conservative flavor, but no-one, not even Michael Wood, is perfect. He often quotes from Anglo-Saxon or Latin accounts of Medieval events -- he's a specialist in Anglo-Saxon -- and translates into modern English for the viewer. He seems quite fluent in both Anglo-Saxon and Latin. It's all quite wonderful.
Where I see room for improvement -- and not just in Michael Wood's shows, but in every show I can recall in the archaeological genre -- is in the way in which old manuscripts are presented to the viewer. The scene will shift from a dig to a library, while Wood says in voice over something like, "To find out more about, we must turn to a manuscript in" -- in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, or in the British Library, as the case may be, or somewhere else.
Wood will walk into special-collections rooms and proceed to read from Latin or Anglo-Saxon precious rare manuscripts. Which is awesome, but -- it leaves out the scholars who are currently working with those manuscripts.
Why not talk to those textual scholars just as he's been talking to the archaeologists? Or at the very least, mention some of them? He reads, in the episode "In Search of Arthur," from the Welsh Annals, the Annales Cambriae, one of the earliest written mentions of King Arthur. He reads the passage about Arthur right from the Bodlian Library's manuscript of the annals, the best existing manuscript.
The thing is, most of us don't have as much access to special collections as Michael Wood does. We can't just drop in and consult the best manuscripts whenever we want to. Luckily for us, in 1860, the Rev John Williams, also well known by his Welsh bardic name Ab Ithel, published an edition of the Annales Canbriae based on the very same manuscript Woods reads from in the show, and two others.
I would like it if Wood, and other hosts of similar shows, would mention the printed editions that you and I can read. I don't know whether a new edition was being prepared while Wood was filming the show about Arthur. If so, Wood could have interviewed the new editor just as easily as he interviewed all those archaeologists. His interviews with the archaeologists have been wonderful. I see no reason to doubt that his interviews with textual editors would have been just as wonderful. If no new edition was underway at the time, Wood still could have interviewed a scholar and authority on the manuscript.
In the episode on Boudica he reads from a manuscript of Tacitus' Annals, the primary written source for Boudica's rebellion. Why not also at least hold up to the camera CD Fisher's 1906 Oxford Classical Texts edition of Tacitus' Annals and mention that the viewer could easily get the original Latin text for themself if they so desired? Or, even better, he could have interviewed Heubner or Wellesley, who were working on new editions at the time.
Being Michael Wood, I'm sure he could've come with far more intelligent questions for the new editors of Tacitus than I ever could, just as he came up with all of those great questions for the archaeologists.
Let the viewers know, let them see and hear, that textual criticism is a living, ongoing, exciting thing, just like archaeology. It just needs the right host, the right presenter, to put it across. Michael Wood could definitely do it. Show the viewers that they can take part in the text in more ways than just seeing the host go into the library and look at a manuscript. Which is great! I don't want any of the producers to stop showing the manuscripts. I just want them to give the viewers a more solid connection to the manuscripts. And if it's not a famous text like the Welsh Annals or Tacitus, if it's actually still unpublished, then talk about how it isn't even published yet, and about the need for more students of Anglo-Saxon or Medieval Latin or what have you.
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