textual criticism

textual criticism
n.
the scholarly study of the text of a written work, often, specif., in an effort to determine the original or most authoritative form of that work

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Introduction

      the technique of restoring texts as nearly as possible to their original form. Texts in this connection are defined as writings other than formal documents, inscribed or printed on paper, parchment, papyrus, or similar materials. The study of formal documents such as deeds and charters belongs to the science known as “diplomatics”; the study of writings on stone is part of epigraphy; while inscriptions on coins and seals are the province of numismatics and sigillography.

      Textual criticism, properly speaking, is an ancillary academic discipline designed to lay the foundations for the so-called higher criticism, which deals with questions of authenticity and attribution, of interpretation, and of literary and historical evaluation. This distinction between the lower and the higher branches of criticism was first made explicitly by the German biblical scholar J.G. Eichhorn (Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried); the first use of the term “textual criticism” in English dates from the middle of the 19th century. In practice the operations of textual and “higher” criticism cannot be rigidly differentiated: at the very outset of his work a critic, faced with variant forms of a text, inevitably employs stylistic and other criteria belonging to the “higher” branch. The methods of textual criticism, insofar as they are not codified common sense, are the methods of historical inquiry. Texts have been transmitted in an almost limitless variety of ways, and the criteria employed by the textual critic—technical, philological, literary, or aesthetic—are valid only if applied in awareness of the particular set of historical circumstances governing each case.

      An acquaintance with the history of texts and the principles of textual criticism is indispensable for the student of history, literature, or philosophy. Written texts supply the main foundation for these disciplines, and some knowledge of the processes of their transmission is necessary for understanding and control of the scholar's basic materials. For the advanced student the criticism and editing of texts offers an unrivalled philological training and a uniquely instructive avenue to the history of scholarship; it is broadly true that all advances in philology have been made in connection with the problems of editing texts. To say this is to recognize that the equipment needed by the critic for his task includes a mastery of the whole field of study within which his text lies; for the editing of Homer (to take an extreme case), a period of some 3,000 years. For the general reader the benefits of textual criticism are less apparent but are nevertheless real. Most men are apt to take texts on trust, even to prefer a familiar version, however debased or unauthentic, to the true one. The reader who resists all change is exemplified by Erasmus' story of the priest who preferred his nonsensical mumpsimus to the correct sumpsimus. Such people are saved from themselves by the activities of the textual critic.

      The law of diminishing returns operates in the textual field as in others: improvements in the texts of the great writers cannot be made indefinitely. Yet a surprisingly large number of texts have not yet been edited satisfactorily. This is particularly true of medieval literature, but also of many modern novels. Indeed the basic materials of most textual investigation, the manuscripts themselves, have as yet not all been identified and catalogued, much less systematically exploited. The first edition of the works of Dickens to be founded on critical study of the textual evidence did not begin to appear until 1966, when K. Tillotson's edition of Oliver Twist was published. Reliable principles of Shakespearean editing have begun to emerge only with modern developments in the techniques of analytical bibliography. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible (1952) and the New English Bible (1970) both incorporate readings of the Old Testament unknown before 1947, the year in which early biblical manuscripts—the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls—were discovered in the caves of Qumrān.

The materials of the investigation
      The premise of the textual critic's work is that whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasionally perverse. Variation can occur in several ways: through mechanical damage or accidental omission; through misunderstanding due to changes in fashions of writing; through ignorance of language or subject matter; through inattention or stupidity; and through deliberate efforts at correction. The task of the textual critic is to detect and, so far as possible, undo these effects. His concern is with the reconstruction of what no longer exists. A text is not a concrete artifact, like a pot or a statue, but an abstract concept or idea. The original text of Aeschylus' Agamemnon or Horace's Odes has perished; what survives is a number of derived forms or states of the text, approximations of varying reliability preserved by tradition. The critic must reduce these approximations as nearly as possible to the first or original state that they imperfectly represent; or if, as sometimes happens for reasons that will be explained below, no single original can be reconstructed or postulated, he must reduce their number to the lowest possible figure. His methods and the degree of his success will be determined by the nature of the individual problem; i.e., the text itself and the circumstances of its transmission. The range of possible situations is vast, as the following survey indicates. The types of text with which the critic is concerned may be classified broadly under three heads.

Books (book) transmitted in print
      For practical purposes it is often assumed that the latest edition of a modern book published during the author's lifetime may be treated as the original. This is a simplification. The actual author's original may have been a manuscript or a typescript or a recording; in the process of publication it has passed through several stages of transmission, including possibly storage in a computer, at any one of which errors have necessarily occurred. Experience teaches that some errors will survive uncorrected in the published version. Further errors are likely to occur if a book is reprinted. Even an edition revised by the author is not to be regarded as textually definitive. Errors committed and overlooked by the author himself may be corrected by the critic in appropriate cases. Special problems are posed by an author's second thoughts, whether preserved in his books and papers or incorporated in editions revised by him; recent research has shown that authorial revision in modern printed books has been underestimated. The extent to which a critic is free to choose between authorial variants on aesthetic grounds is a matter of debate.

      Books published before the 19th century pose essentially similar problems in a more intractable form, as may be seen in the case of Shakespeare (Shakespeare, William). No manuscript of any of Shakespeare's plays survives, and there were substantial intervals between the dates of composition and the first printed versions, in which unauthorized variation clearly occurred. For Shakespeare's plays, indeed, the very concept of an author's original may be misleading. Elizabethan printers clearly had little regard for strict textual accuracy, so that allowance must be made not only for error but for deliberate alteration by compositors; thus the textual criticism of 16th- and 17th-century books must include a study of the practices of early printers.

Books transmitted in manuscript
      Nearly all classical and patristic texts, and a great many medieval texts, fall into this category. Every handwritten copy of a book is textually unique, and to that extent represents a separate edition of the text. Whereas the characteristic grouping of printed texts is “monogenous” (i.e., in a straight line of descent), that of manuscript texts is “polygenous” or branched and interlocking. The critic is in principle obliged to establish the relationship of every surviving manuscript copy of a text to every other. The difficulty and indeed the feasibility of this undertaking varies enormously from case to case. The following extremes embrace a wide range of intermediate possibilities. (1) The authority for a text may be a single surviving copy (e.g., Menander, Dyscolus) or a copy that can be shown to be the source of all other copies (e.g., Varro, De Lingua Latina) or an edition printed directly from a copy now lost (e.g., the work of the Roman historian Velleius Paterculus); or a text may be transmitted in scores of copies whose interrelationships cannot be exactly determined (e.g., Claudian, De raptu Proserpinae). (2) The interval between the original and the earliest surviving copies may be very short (e.g., the French medieval poet Chrétien de Troyes) or very long (e.g., the Attic tragedians). (3) A tradition may be “dynamic”—i.e., the text may have been copied and recopied many times even in a short time (e.g., Dante's La divina commedia (Divine Comedy, The)); or it may be “static”—i.e., the number of transmissional stages even over a long period may have been few (e.g., Epigrammata Bobiensia a Latin translation of Greek epigrams). (4) A text may be a religious or literary work that was respectfully treated by copyists and protected by an exegetical tradition (e.g., the Bible, the Latin poet Virgil); or a popular book that was exposed to correction, glossing, and amplification by readers (e.g., the Regula magistri [“Rule of the Master,” a Latin work related to the Rule of St. Benedict] and much medieval vernacular literature). (5) A text may have been written and transmitted after the establishment of a scholarly tradition, or it may show signs of “wild” and arbitrary variation dating from an age in which standards of exact verbal accuracy were low. To this extent all Greek books written before the establishment of the Alexandrian library (see below History of textual criticism (textual criticism)) were exposed to the hazards associated with oral transmission.

Books transmitted orally
      Many texts have been orally transmitted, sometimes for long periods, before being committed to writing, and much textual variation may be attributable to this stage of transmission. Often in such cases the critic cannot attempt to construct an “original” but must stop short at some intermediate stage: thus the edited text of Homer means in practice the closest possible approximation to the text as established by the scholars of Alexandria. The length, complexity, and fidelity of oral traditions varies enormously. The text of the old Indian Rigveda was transmitted orally almost without variation from very ancient to modern times, whereas much old French epic and Provençal (Provençal literature) lyric has descended in variant redactions for which a common source may be postulated but cannot be reconstructed. Sometimes this is attributable not to spontaneous variation but to deliberate reworking, whether by the author, as appears to be the case with the three (or perhaps four) versions of the English poem Piers Plowman, or by later revisers, as with the four versions of Digenis Akritas (a Greek epic). The distinction, however, is not always easy to draw. These considerations apply to a wide range of texts from ancient Hebrew through Old Norse to modern Russian, but they are especially important for medieval literature. In this field perhaps more than in any other the critic's aims and methods will be dictated by the character of the oral tradition, the stage at which it attained a more or less fixed form in writing, and the attitude of copyists in a particular genre to precise verbal accuracy. A problem of particular difficulty and importance is posed by the Greek New Testament (biblical criticism). Though the text appears to have been transmitted from the first in writing, the textual variations are in many ways analogous to those of an oral tradition, and it is commonly held that the essential task of the critic is not to try to reconstruct the “original” but to isolate those forms of the text that were current in particular centres in the ancient world.

Critical methods (exegesis)
      From the preceding discussion it is apparent that there is only one universally valid principle of textual criticism, the formulation of which can be traced back at least as far as the 18th-century German historian A.L. von Schlözer: that each case is special. The critic must begin by defining the problem presented by his particular material and the consequent limitations of his inquiry. Everything that is said below about “method” must be understood in the light of this general proviso. The celebrated dictum of the 18th-century English classical scholar Richard Bentley (Bentley, Richard) that “reason and the facts outweigh a hundred manuscripts” (ratio et res ipsa centum codicibus potiores sunt) is not a repudiation of science but a reminder that the critic is by definition one who discriminates (the word itself derives from the Greek word for “judge”), and that no amount of learning or mastery of method will compensate for a lack of common sense. To study the great critics in action is incomparably more instructive than to read theoretical manuals. As the editor of Manilius, A.E. Housman (Housman, A.E.), wrote,

A man who possesses common sense and the use of reason must not expect to learn from treatises or lectures on textual criticism anything that he could not, with leisure and industry, find out for himself. What the lectures and treatises can do for him is to save him time and trouble by presenting to him immediately considerations which would in any case occur to him sooner or later.

      Admittedly, the technical advances in textual bibliography mentioned below are not such as would sooner or later occur to any reflective and intelligent person; but bibliography, like paleography, is ancillary to textual criticism proper, and Housman's words are strictly true. What they imply is that good critics are born, not made.

      The critical process can be resolved into three stages: (1) recension, (2) examination, and (3) emendation. Though these stages are logically distinct, (2) and (3) are in practice performed simultaneously, and even (1) entails the application of criteria theoretically appropriate to (2) and (3).

Recension
      The operation of recension is the reconstructing of the earliest form or forms of the text that can be inferred from the surviving evidence. Such evidence may be internal or external. Internal evidence consists of all extant copies or editions of the text, together with versions in other languages, citations in other authors, and other sources not belonging to the main textual tradition. These witnesses (as they may be called) must be identified, dated, and described, using the appropriate paleographical and bibliographical techniques. They must then be collated; i.e., the variant readings that they contain must be registered by comparison with some selected form of the text, often a standard printed edition. Where the number of witnesses is large, collation may have to be of selected passages. If there is only one witness to a text, collation and recension are synonymous, and the critic passes straight to examination and emendation. Generally, however, he will be faced with two or more witnesses offering variant forms or states of the text.

      Collateral evidence as to the transmission of a text may be supplied from sources external to the direct or indirect textual tradition. Thus the ancient biographers throw light on the circumstances in which Virgil's Aeneid was published. Inferred textual stages may be dated on the evidence of copying practices at different periods, or by association with a particular scholar, or from entries in medieval library catalogues. Generally speaking, information of this sort will contribute more to the history than to the criticism of the text, but the two fields are intimately connected; and the better the textual history is known, the more reliable the control of the critic over conjectural solutions to specific problems. In the case of printed books, such external evidence is as a rule more plentiful; it is often essential, since so much may turn on the accurate dating of editions. Relevant information must be sought in the published and unpublished records of stationers, printers, booksellers, and publishers and in other archival material.

      Having assembled his evidence, the critic may proceed, broadly speaking, in one of two different ways, according as he decides to handle the problem of interrelationships “genealogically” or “textually.”

      In the “genealogical” or “stemmatic” approach, the attempt to reconstruct an original text here relies on the witnesses themselves regarded as physical objects related to each other chronologically and genealogically; the text and the textual vehicle (the book itself) are treated as a single entity. On the basis of shared variants, chiefly errors and omissions, a family tree of the witnesses (stemma codicum) is drawn up. Those witnesses that repeat the testimony of other surviving witnesses are discarded, and from the agreements of the remainder the text is reconstructed as it existed in the lost copy from which they descend, the “archetype.” Thus in the tradition of the 6th-century monk Cassiodorus' Institutiones the relationships of the manuscripts of the authentic version of the text of Book II may be represented by the accompanying diagram. The Roman letters represent extant manuscripts, and the Greek letters represent the lost manuscripts from which they derive, here arbitrarily dated. The text of the archetype Ω is established by the agreement of B and Σ. Since B survives, the readings of MUP, which are derived from it, would be of value only where B had suffered damage after M and β were copied from it. In such cases the text of β could be inferred from the agreement of UP and the text of B from the agreement of Mβ (or MU or MP). The text of Σ can be inferred from the agreement of SLσ or SL or Sσ (or ST or SD) or Lσ (or LT or LD). K, being copied from L, would be of value only where L had suffered damage after K was copied from it. An important distinction is here exemplified between “trifid” and “bifid” stemmata. Where there are three independent witnesses to a source, as with Σ, its reading is certified by the agreement of all three or of any two; where there are only two witnesses, as with Ω, and they disagree, the reading of the source cannot be certified. Even in the latter situation, however, the number of possible variants existing in the source would have been reduced to two. Thus in theory the genealogical, or stemmatic, method allows the critic to eliminate from consideration all variants that cannot be traced back to the archetype or earliest inferable textual state.

      While in principle this method is unassailable, it depends for its practical validity on the assumption that each copyist followed only one model or exemplar and generated only variants peculiar to himself. This is called “vertical” transmission, and a tradition of this kind is called “closed.” Once the possibility is admitted that a copyist used more than one exemplar or (the more probable supposition) copied an exemplar in which variants from another source or sources had been incorporated—i.e., that more than one textual state may coexist in a single witness—the construction of a stemma becomes more complicated and may be impossible. This is called “horizontal” transmission, and a tradition of this kind is called “open” or “contaminated.” The practice of critics faced with contamination tends to vary, for historical reasons, from field to field. Editors of classical texts generally adopt a controlled eclecticism, classifying the witnesses broadly by groups according to the general character of their texts and choosing between their readings largely on grounds of intrinsic excellence. Medievalists, following the French scholar Joseph Bédier (see below), sometimes revert to the traditional practice, to which their training may dispose, of selecting a single witness as the main basis of the text. For editors of printed books, contamination is not an important problem.

      In the “textual” or “distributional” approach, the text and the textual vehicle are dissociated; the emphasis is on the analysis of the variants themselves and their distribution rather than on the character of the text as presented by individual witnesses. The techniques or models employed include those of statistics, symbolic logic, and biological taxonomy. Two theoretical advantages are suggested for this approach. First, objectivity: no judgments of value are entailed, whereas the genealogical method calls for decisions as to the correctness of readings or textual states. Second, the possibility of mechanization: long and elaborate calculations involving thousands of variants may be performed by a computer. This possibility is especially attractive to New Testament critics, who are confronted with about 5,000 manuscripts of the Greek text as well as versions in other languages and patristic citations. In practice, however, these advantages are to a large extent illusory. An “objective” (i.e., undiscriminating) treatment of all variants in a literary text such as Ovid's Metamorphoses (of which more than 300 manuscripts exist) without regard to their metrical and stylistic quality would be a self-evident waste of time and produce merely confusion. The critic cannot abrogate his critical function, which implies discrimination, at the very beginning of the critical process. Moreover, the preparation or programming of a text for treatment in this way, whether mechanical aids are used or not, is long and laborious, and one must consider whether in a given case the results justify the expenditure of effort. Texts have been transmitted by a combination of purpose and accident that in any particular instance is both unique and unpredictable, and no machine or statistical model exhibits the versatility necessary to unravel the incomplete and tangled skein. Mechanical methods have been most successful in fields other than recension (see below).

Examination
      The process of determining whether the transmitted text or any of the transmitted variants of it is “authentic”—i.e., what the author intended—is known as examination. The prior process of recension has reduced the number of textual states having a claim to be considered “authoritative.” Many different situations are possible. In a completely closed tradition it is theoretically feasible to reconstruct the archetype with such certainty that only a single form of the text without variants remains to be examined. In practice this is extremely unlikely to be the situation. Usually the critic is faced with pairs (sometimes triplets) of variants, all with a presumptive claim to be considered authoritative. In some traditions he will confront variant versions of the whole text. Where papyri or other early sources independent of the main tradition are available, he may have to reckon with “pretraditional” (i.e., pre-archetypal) variants. The process of examination calls upon the critic's full range of knowledge as well as his innate powers of taste and discrimination. The criteria applied must be those appropriate to the particular author (supposing his identity to be known), the period, the genre, and the particular character of the work. The opposing demands of analogy and anomaly must be weighed according to the circumstances. Many of the older generation of critics based their decisions on aprioristic or rigidly analogical principles of elegance and propriety, while the canons of modern criticism are based on historical studies of language and style. It is here that the circularity inherent in the whole operation is most evident, for the linguistic and stylistic criteria employed are themselves based on inductions from texts, probably including the one under examination. There is no escape from this difficulty; as the German philologist Karl Lachmann observed, it is precisely the task of the critic “to tread that circle deftly and warily.”

Emendation
      The attempt to restore the transmitted text to its authentic state is called emendation. There will usually be a chronological gap, sometimes of several centuries, between the archetype, or earliest inferable state of the text, and the original; nearly all manuscripts of classical authors date from the Middle Ages. The history of the text during the intervening period may be illustrated from external sources; but if examination has convinced the critic that the transmitted text (or its variants) are not authentic, he normally has no recourse but to bridge the gap by conjecture. Conjectural emendation has been defined by the American scholar B.L. Gildersleeve as “the appeal from manuscripts we have to a manuscript that has been lost.” Theoretically this definition is acceptable, if we interpret “manuscript” as “source,” but in practice the making of conjectures, as distinct from testing them, is intelligent guesswork.

      No part of the theory of textual criticism has suffered more from misunderstanding than has conjectural emendation. Such conjectural, or divinatory, criticism has in the past enjoyed a traditional preeminence: Dr. Johnson (Johnson, Samuel) observed that William Warburton's correction of “good” to “god” in the second act of Hamlet (scene 2, line 182) almost set the critic on a level with the author. That idea is as erroneous as the frame of mind in which the Italian scholar C. Pascal founded the Paravia series of editions in order to purge Latin texts of German conjectures. The best critic is he who discriminates best, whether between variants or between transmitted text and conjecture.

      Conjectures as a rule occur to the mind spontaneously or not at all; diagnosis and prescription often present themselves at the same moment. This instinctive process is not under the critic's control, though he can sharpen and regulate it by constant study and observation. The outcome of the process, the emendation itself, can and must be controlled and tested by precisely the same criteria as are used in deciding between variants. This is essentially an exercise in balancing probabilities. These probabilities are historical. The conventional distinction between intrinsic and transcriptional (i.e., paleographical or bibliographical) probability tends to obscure a fundamental historical point. If the transmitted form of the text lies at few removes or a short distance in time from the original, a conjectural solution which violates transcriptional probability is less likely to be correct than if the text has undergone a long and complex process of deterioration. In the latter case the critic may attach little or no importance to transcriptional probability. The critic cannot neglect the study of paleography or bibliography, but he must not give them more than their critical due. What that may be depends on the particular historical circumstances. He will study carefully the rationale of error in manuscripts and books themselves rather than in the schematic classifications of critical manuals; and he will learn from experience to distinguish between the types of error that may be called “psychological” (i.e., those committed by a tired or inattentive copyist, whatever language or instruments he uses) and those contingent on the period and the medium of transmission, whether it be the mouth and the ear, the pen, the hand composing stick, the linotype or typewriter keyboard, the computer or photocopying machine, or the printing press. Two complementary principles originated by the New Testament critics of the 18th century are often cited as aids to decision: utrum in alterum abiturum erat? (“which reading would be more likely to have given rise to the other?”) and difficilior lectio potior (“the more difficult reading is to be preferred”). These are no more than useful rules of thumb; it has been suggested that in practice these and other such principles reduce themselves to the truism melior lectio potior, “the better reading is to be preferred.”

      From this discussion it is apparent that the traditional opposition between “conservative” and “radical” styles of criticism that has haunted textual criticism since St. Jerome has no meaning. The critic does not attack or defend the transmitted text; he asks himself whether it is authentic. How radically he treats it, and how many conjectural readings he substitutes for transmitted readings, depends not on his temperament but on the nature of the problem. If he has studied the history of textual criticism he will know that as a matter of demonstrable fact nearly all conjectures are wrong, and he will accept that many of his solutions are in the nature of things provisional.

Editorial technique
      Critical texts are edited according to conventions that vary with the type of text (classical, medieval, modern) but follow certain general principles. In some cases, as with newly edited papyri and with palimpsests (writing materials re-used after erasure), the edition will take the form of a diplomatic transcript; i.e., the most accurate possible representation of a particular textual form. Generally, however, the editor constitutes his text in accordance with his own judgment on principles explained in his introduction; and he indicates his sources in critical notes (apparatus criticus), preferably at the foot of the page. These notes are usually couched in a special terminology that relies heavily on abbreviation and the use of conventional signs or letters (sigla) to identify the witnesses. In classical and patristic texts the language of the notes is usually Latin. Editorial judgment will be influenced by the presumed needs of readers: in an edition intended for scholars, very corrupt passages are often printed as transmitted and marked with a dagger (†), whereas in an edition for the student or general reader some compromise may be accepted in the interests of readability.

      A much-discussed problem is the treatment of “accidentals”—variations in spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and the like. Few if any ancient text traditions preserve reliable evidence of authorial practice in these matters, so that the editor is concerned only with variants that affect the sense; in preparing his text for printing he will adopt modern conventions of presentation and punctuation and a normalized orthography. The same holds good for the majority of medieval texts. Printed texts, however, were generally corrected or seen through the press by the author, or at all events by a contemporary, so that the editor may be reasonably confident of reproducing at least a decent approximation to authorial usage. Whether, or to what extent, he should do so is much debated; opinions differ sharply as to the usefulness of “old-spelling” editions of Shakespeare and other early writers.

History of textual criticism

From antiquity to the Renaissance
      Until the 20th century the development of textual criticism was inevitably dominated by classical and biblical studies. The systematic study and practice of the subject originated in the 3rd century BC with the Greek scholars of Alexandria (Alexandria, Library of). Literary culture had before that time been predominantly oral, though books were in common use by the 5th century, and many texts had suffered damage because the idea of precise textual accuracy and reproduction was unfamiliar. The aim of the librarians of Alexandria was to collect and catalogue every extant Greek book and to produce critical editions of the most important together with textual and interpretative commentaries. Many such editions and commentaries did in fact appear. Alexandrian editing was distinguished above all by respect for the tradition; the text was constituted from the oldest and best copies available, and conjectural emendation was rigidly confined to the commentary, which was contained in a separate volume. An elaborate battery of critical signs was used to refer from text to commentary. These techniques were applied, though on a less ambitious scale, by Roman scholars to Latin (Latin literature) texts. Fidelity to tradition was the chief legacy of ancient textual scholarship to later ages; the copyist was expected to reproduce his exemplar as exactly as he could, and correction was based on comparison with other copies, not on the unaided conjectural sagacity of the scribe. Such was the practice of the best monastic scriptoria such as that of Tours, or of the best scholars, such as Lupus of Ferrières (fl. 850). From about 1350, however, a change in attitude is evident, particularly in the West. What is often called the revival of learning was in reality a practical movement to enlist the heritage of classical antiquity in the service of the new Christian humanism. In order to make them usable (i.e., readable), texts were corrected freely and often arbitrarily by scholars, copyists, and readers (the three categories being in fact hardly distinguishable). At its best, as seen in the activities of a scholar like Demetrius Triclinius (Triclinius, Demetrius), later medieval and early Renaissance criticism verges on scientific scholarship, but such cases are exceptional. For the most part the correction of texts was a purely subjective display of taste, sometimes right but much more often wrong, and resting as a rule on nothing more solid than a superficial sense of elegance. In consequence, by the 1470s, when the first printed editions (editiones principes) of classical texts began to appear, most Greek and Latin authors were circulating in a textually debased condition, and it was manuscripts of this character that almost always served as copy for the early printers. Very little editing in any real sense of the word was done; the scholars who saw the editiones principes through the press generally confined themselves to superficial improvements.

From Politian to Cobet
      This state of affairs entailed that down to the 19th century most critics were engaged not in establishing and emending texts on scientific principles but in correcting, in a necessarily unsystematic fashion, a vulgate or received text (lectio recepta) that was itself the product of an almost entirely haphazard process of variation and conjecture. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the manuscripts themselves, the basic materials of the investigation, were largely inaccessible to scholars. The Italian poet and scholar Politian, unlike most of his contemporaries, was aware that only through the identification and comparison of the best manuscripts could texts be improved; his notes and collations show that he understood the problem correctly as essentially one of control of the sources. What might have been done in this field is shown by his work, cut short by his early death, on the Florentine codex of Justinian's Pandects. Many manuscripts were still privately owned, their very existence unknown to scholars; public libraries were few and published catalogues fewer; travel was difficult, expensive, and often dangerous. It was not until the twin disciplines of diplomatic (diplomatics) and paleography were founded by the great Benedictine monks Mabillon (Mabillon, Jean) and Montfaucon (Montfaucon, Bernard de), and developed by their successors, that a critical use of the evidence became possible; and much of the evidence itself did not become available until after the Napoleonic Wars, when most of the private stock of manuscripts passed finally into public collections.

      Some advances were taking place, slowly and unsystematically, in both the theory and practice of textual criticism. The history of critical method in this period is most profitably studied in the best editions of the best editors. The accepted method was to correct the text (i.e., the text of the last printed edition) codicum et ingenii ope; i.e., with the aid of the manuscript and printed sources and the critic's own ingenuity. Divination was subordinated to authority, and any reading found in a manuscript or printed text was accounted superior to any conjecture, whatever its intrinsic merits. The first important departure from this pattern is seen in the edition of Catullus (Catullus, Gaius Valerius) by J.J. Scaliger (Scaliger, Joseph Justus) (1577), in which the possibilities of the genealogical method, already understood in principle by Politian and other Renaissance scholars, were exemplified by the demonstration that all the extant copies derived from a lost manuscript, whose orthography and provenance Scaliger was prepared to reconstruct. Almost equally significant was Richard Bentley's (Bentley, Richard) edition of Horace (1711), in which for the first time the role of conjecture in the critical and editorial process was recognized and the tradition of producing a corrected version of the text of previous editors was decisively rejected. Bentley's scholarship was greatly admired in the Netherlands, and the editions of the great Dutch Latinists J.F. Gronovius and N. Heinsius were informed by Bentleian principles. Under his influence there grew up what may be called an Anglo-Dutch school of criticism, the two most typical representatives of which were Richard Porson (Porson, Richard) and C.G. Cobet. Its strength lay in sound judgment and good taste rooted in minute linguistic and metrical study; its weaknesses were an excessive reliance on analogical criteria and an indifference to German science and method. Its influence may still be seen in the empiricism that characterizes much critical work by English scholars.

From Bentley to Lachmann
      The decisive influence on the editing of secular texts came from the New Testament critics of the 18th century. The printed text of the Greek New Testament in common use was still essentially that established in 1516 by Desiderius Erasmus (Erasmus, Desiderius). For his edition, produced in great haste, he had used such manuscripts, neither ancient nor good, as chanced to be accessible to him. Superficially revised, this was the text termed in the Elzevier edition of 1633 “now received by all,” nunc ab omnibus receptum. Bentley proposed an edition on radical lines in which he engaged to give the text “exactly as it was in the best exemplars at the time of the Council of Nice. So that there shall not be twenty words, nor even particles, difference . . .” This project never materialized, but editions of the Greek text that did not reproduce the textus receptus were published in England by Daniel Mace (1729), William Bowyer, the Younger (1763), and Edward Harwood (1776). On the Continent, meanwhile, New Testament criticism was being developed on scientific and historical lines by a succession of distinguished scholars, notably J.A. Bengel, J.J. Wettstein, J.S. Semler, and J.J. Griesbach. They shaped the genealogical method that was later refined by editors of classical texts. Wettstein also deserves commemoration as the first New Testament critic to use sigla systematically. This was important, since some at least of the deficiencies of classical editions at this time are attributable to the lack of suitable conventions for the presentation of critical information, together with a conservative and belletristic attitude to technical jargon by publishers, scholars, and users of books in general. Though sigla occur sporadically in editions as early as the 16th century and were used by S. Haverkamp in his Lucretius (1725) in something like the modern style, they did not become normal until the second half of the 19th century.

      The genealogical, or stemmatic, method of recension has already been described. It is usually associated with the name of the German Karl Lachmann (Lachmann, Karl (Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm)), but it had its origins in the work of J.A. Bengel (Bengel, J A) and his successors, and almost every essential feature of it was already present in the work of Lachmann's precursors such as J.A. Ernesti, F.A. Wolf, K.G. Zumpt, F.W. Ritschl, and J.N. Madvig. Nevertheless Lachmann occupies a central position in the development of textual criticism because of the unusual power and penetration of his scholarship, the range of textual material on which he worked, and his immense contemporary and posthumous influence. His edition of the Greek New Testament (1831; 2nd ed. 1842–50) was intended primarily as a vindication of the principles of Bentley and Bengel and a demonstration that the textus receptus must be finally rejected. Similarly his famous edition of Lucretius (1850) is important as an exemplification (exegesis) of the method in action, since the tradition of Lucretius is peculiarly suitable for the purpose. The demonstration fell short of completeness, for Lachmann had not fully grasped the problem and so failed to exploit the method fully. It has been suggested that Lachmann's best critical work was in his editions of medieval German texts; their influence will be considered below. The Lachmannian model of recension derived added authority from seemingly analogous models in other fields, especially that of comparative philology. As propagated by disciples, notably Moritz Haupt, it dominated textual studies for half a century.

Related developments in the late 19th century
      Possibly the most important technical advance in the latter part of the 19th century was the perfection of photography (photography, history of). Instead of travelling in search of his material, the paleographer or critic could now assemble and study it at relatively little expense and without leaving his desk.

      During the last quarter of the 19th century the tempo of archaeological discovery in classical and biblical lands was vastly increased, and many new texts were unearthed. Some of these were in previously unknown languages, setting new problems of decipherment. Specifically relevant to textual studies are the many Greek papyri recovered from Egypt. These have thrown much light on the history and techniques of ancient book production and scholarship and hence, indirectly, on critical problems. Where the texts they contain are already known, their evidence has tended to emphasize our ignorance of the textual history of classical literature in antiquity itself. Being usually far older than the manuscripts already known, they often illuminate the “pretraditional” state of the text; by sometimes offering readings that agree with those of late and “inferior” medieval copies they justify editors in a policy of cautious eclecticism. Papyrus discoveries have been of particular moment for the text of the New Testament (biblical criticism).

      Editors of printed texts (English literature), having invariably received a classical education (no other being available), had naturally followed, with minor modifications, the methods of classical editing. They would reprint the text of the last edition with such improvements as editorial taste and learning suggested but with no attempt to investigate the sources of the text. Since Lachmann's method was inapplicable to printed texts, this procedure continued until, by the end of the 19th century, the text of Shakespeare (Shakespeare, William), for example, was in a state somewhat analogous to that of most classical writers at the time of the editiones principes. Much of the work of modern Shakespearean editors has consisted of undoing the damage inflicted by their predecessors. The early 20th century saw the rise of a new school of “biblio-textual” criticism, most notably represented by A.W. Pollard, R.B. McKerrow, and W.W. Greg. Its object was to devise a style of recension appropriate to the special circumstances under which early printed texts were produced and propagated, and its methods were those of analytical bibliography. These developments are of direct importance for the criticism and editing of a large range of texts of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, particularly those of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. They have also engendered a discussion of general methodological interest on the role of bibliographical as opposed to historical and literary criteria in the editorial process. This debate continues.

      Critics and editors of medieval texts had also inevitably been influenced by developments in the classical field. Before Lachmann it had been usual to choose a single manuscript as the main basis for an edition. Because of the circumstances in which much medieval literature was composed and transmitted this was not necessarily unscientific, and the surviving bulk of texts was so large as to dictate that approach in many cases if they were to be edited at all. This had been the style of editing followed by the Belgian Jesuits known as Bollandists (Bollandist), the French Benedictines called Maurists (Maurist), and the Italian scholar L.A. Muratori (Muratori, Lodovico Antonio), and perpetuated in the indispensable Patrologiae Cursus Completus (edition of the Church Fathers) of the French priest Jacques-Paul Migne (Migne, Jacques-Paul). At its best it is seen in the editions of medieval Latin chronicles by the 18th-century Oxford antiquary Thomas Hearne (Hearne, Thomas), some of which are still standard works. A more scientific approach was adopted in the publications of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the later volumes of which (from about 1880) were produced by editors trained in the school of Lachmann. Similarly, editors of vernacular texts followed the lead that Lachmann had given in his editions of such early German poems as the Nibelunge Not (1826) and the Iwein (1827). An important development in the application of the method was due to the medievalists G. Gröber and G. Paris (Paris, Gaston), who first emphasized the significance of common errors. But in the general uncritical enthusiasm for scientific method, the genealogical approach was too often used without regard for the special conditions under which medieval literature has been handed down.

Reaction against the genealogical method
      Haupt had proclaimed in his lectures that his main object was to teach method. But confidence in method led to its misuse. The Lachmannian formula of recension was applied to texts, classical as well as medieval, for which it was unsuitable, often with grotesque results. Commonly this took the form of choosing on “scientific” (i.e., stemmatic) grounds a “best manuscript” (codex optimus) and defending its readings as authoritative even where common sense showed that they could not be authentic. This was the type of editing satirized by A.E. Housman (Housman, A.E.) in the brilliant prefaces to his editions of Manilius (1903) and Juvenal (1905) and in many reviews and articles. It flourished chiefly between 1875 and 1900, but the dangers of excessive methodological rigidity had already been foreseen. In 1841 H. Sauppe in his Epistola Critica ad G. Hermannum had emphasized the diversity of transmissional situations and the difficulty or actual impossibility of classifying the manuscripts in all cases. In 1843 Lachmann's pupil O. Jahn, in his edition of Persius, had repudiated the strict application of the genealogical method as unsuitable to the tradition of that poet. The most extreme position was taken by E. Schwartz, who in his edition of Eusebius' Historia ecclesiastica (1909) denied that “vertically” transmitted texts of Greek books existed at all. The limitations of the stemmatic method have subsequently been stressed in a more temperate fashion by other writers. The modern tendency is to acknowledge the validity of the method in principle while recommending a cautious empiricism in its application. For the editor of a contaminated tradition—and most traditions are probably contaminated—the lesson of recent research is that authoritative evidence may survive even in late and generally corrupt or interpolated sources.

      More radical criticism of the method has come from medievalists. In 1913 and again in 1928 the French scholar J. Bédier (Bédier, Joseph) attacked the stemmatic method because the stemmata it produced for medieval texts almost invariably had only two branches. Subsequent investigation has shown that Bédier overrated the inherent improbability of this situation, and it is generally agreed that his criticisms had to do with improper application rather than with the method itself. The point taken by H. Quentin (1922) has already been mentioned: that the method entails argument in a circle, since it relies on the identification of errors at the beginning of a process designed to lead to that very end. This objection, more cogent in theory than in practice, applies with greater force to medieval than to classical texts. The linguistic and stylistic canons of classical Greek and Latin are relatively strict and well defined, whereas the vocabulary, grammar, and usage of many medieval authors (especially when an oral prehistory is in question) is often not certain enough to allow reliable discrimination between variant and error. Classical texts, moreover, have passed through a series of bottlenecks in their history, which have simplified editorial problems by eliminating a high proportion of the evidence (cf. the remarks on papyri above). With a few exceptions, such as the commentary of Servius, only one version of each text remains to be reconstructed, whereas many medieval texts are extant in several redactions that cannot be winnowed by the stemmatic method so as to leave only one. Quentin's own method, which depended on the comparison of variants in groups of three, without prejudice as to their correctness, has not been generally adopted. It is immensely laborious and does not in practice possess the objectivity that its inventor claimed for it. Bédier and Quentin have, however, done good service to textual criticism in enjoining caution. The best critics in all fields now agree in rejecting the “logical” (i.e., the illogical) application of any method if the results conflict with common sense, and in stressing the necessity of judging variant readings and forms of a text on their intrinsic merits in the light of the information available.

Mechanical methods
      Quentin also gave a lead to later investigators in calling attention to the possibility of basing recension on the variants themselves, and the more sophisticated methods of Greg (1927), Archibald Hill (1950), Vinton Dearing (1959), and J. Froger (1968) may be seen as a continuation of his work. It has already been suggested that methods of this type, so far as recension is concerned, have been of primarily theoretical interest. But the use of mechanical and computing techniques in this field is in its infancy, and assessment must be provisional. Certain practical applications seem to have proved themselves. Mechanical aids to collation have been successfully used in editing Shakespeare and Dryden. computer storage and analysis of texts can provide information about authorial usage, such as stylistic and metrical patterns, and facilitate the production of concordances. These aids are more relevant to conjectural emendation (as shown by their application to the Dead Sea Scrolls) and the “higher” criticism (e.g., determination of authenticity) than to the recension of texts. The formula or machine that will do the critic's essential work for him still awaits discovery; the best texts are produced by the best scholars, whatever their method or lack of method. Lachmann observed that the establishment of a text according to its tradition is a strictly historical undertaking. Twentieth-century research into the composition and transmission of ancient, medieval, and modern texts has confirmed the truth of his pronouncement.

Edward John Kenney

Additional Reading
For oral transmission the fundamental work is H.M. and N.K. Chadwick, The Growth of Literature, 3 vol. (1932–40, reprinted 1969). Classical, biblical, and medieval texts are all covered (but somewhat unevenly) by H. Hunger et al., Geschichte der Textüberlieferung der antiken und mittelalterlichen Literatur, 2 vol. (1961–64). For classical texts in general the best introduction is L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (1968); more specialized are A.C. Clark, The Descent of Manuscripts (1918); and A. Dain, Les manuscrits, 2nd rev. ed. (1964). For special areas, see B.A. van Groningen, Traité d'histoire et de critique des textes grecs (1963); R.D. Dawe, The Collation and Investigation of Manuscripts of Aeschylus (1964); R. Renehan, Greek Textual Criticism: A Reader (1969); L. Havet, Manuel de critique verbale appliquée aux textes latins (1911), an exhaustive catalogue raisonné of scribal error; E.G. Turner, Greek Papyri: An Introduction (1968), important for the history of Greek texts in antiquity. For biblical texts, in addition to Hunger (op. cit.), the standard work on the New Testament is B.M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, 2nd ed. (1968). For patristic texts an excellent case study raising important general issues is M. Bevenot, The Tradition of Manuscripts: A Study in the Transmission of St. Cyprion's Treatises (1961). For medieval texts a good exposition of typical problems may be found in D'A.S. Avalle, “Die Liederhandschriften und die Textkritik,” in Hunger (op. cit.), 2:273–290; see also J.A. Asher, “Truth and Fiction: The Text of Medieval Manuscripts,” Aumla, 25:6–16 (1966). For printed books the standard work is F. Bowers, Bibliography and Textual Criticism (1964); while a useful collection of essays may be found in O.M. Brack and W. Barnes (eds.), Bibliography and Textual Criticism: English and American Literature, 1700 to the Present (1969).For the history of the stemmatic method and the contribution of Lachmann, S. Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann (1963), is definitive. For its application, P. Maas, Textual Criticism (Eng. trans. 1958), an austere theoretical exposition; and G. Pasquali, Storia della tradizione e critica del testo, 2nd ed. (1952), brilliant but discursive, are complementary and fundamental. The reaction to the stemmatic method may be studied in H. Quentin, Mémoire sur l'établissement du texte de la Vulgate (1922), Essais de critique textuelle–ecdotique (1926); J. Burke Severs, “Quentin's Theory of Textual Criticism,” English Inst. Annual 1941, pp. 65–93 (1942); J. Bedier, “La tradition manuscrite du Lai de L'Ombre: Réflexions sur l'art d'éditer les anciens textes,” Romania, 54:161–96, 321–56 (1928). A. Castellani, Bédier avait-il raison? (1957); W.W. Greg, The Calculus of Variants (1927); A.A. Hill, “Some Postulates for Distributional Study of Texts,” Stud. in Biblphy., 3:63–95 (1950). For further discussion of these developments, see W.P. Shepard, “Recent Theories of Textual Criticism,” Mod. Philol., 28:129–141 (1930); J. Andrieu, “Principes et recherches en critique textuelle,” in Mémorial des études latines . . . J. Marouzeau, pp. 458–74 (1943); E.B. Ham, “Textual Criticism and Common Sense,” Romance Philol., 12:198–215 (1959). For mechanized techniques, see V.A. Dearing, A Manual of Textual Analysis (1959); J. Froger, La critique des textes et son automatisation (1968). For the taxonomic approach, see J.G. Griffith, “A Taxonomic Study of the Manuscript Tradition of Juvenal,” Mus. Helv., 25:101–138 (1968); “Numerical Taxonomy and Some Primary Manuscripts of the Gospels,” J. Theol. Stud., 20:390–406 (1969).For classical texts on textual criticism the standard works are still: O. Stahlin, Editionstechnik, 2nd ed. (1914); and A. Delatte and A. Severyns, Emploi des signes critiques (1938). For medieval texts, see A. Dondaine, “Abbréviations latines et signes raccommandés pour l'apparat critique des éditions des textes médiévaux,” Bull. de la soc. int. pour l'étude de la philosophie méd., 2:142–149 (1960); and for papyri, see Turner (op. cit.); and H.C. Youtie, The Textual Criticism of Documentary Papyri: Prolegomena (1958).Many of the works cited above include discussion of general principles of textual criticism. In addition, the following works may be mentioned: H. Kantorowicz, Einführung in die Textkritik (1921), sound emphasis on the roles of probability and common sense; A.E. Housman, “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” Proc. Class. Assoc., 18:67–84 (1922), a brilliant polemic against hard-and-fast “rules” of criticism; L. Bieler, “The Grammarian's Craft,” Folia, 10:3–42 (1956), a useful summary discussion of modern developments; and A.H. McDonald, “Textual Criticism,” in Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1970), a sound exposition for classical students. Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983), is a study of the role of non-literary contexts in textual criticism.

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