Textual criticism

Textual criticism is a branch of philology that examines the extant manuscript copies of an ancient or medieval literary work to produce a text that is as close as possible to the original. The original is called the autograph.

Related Topics:
Philology - Ancient - Medieval - Text - Autograph

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Before the invention of printing, literary works had to be copied by hand and each time a manuscript was copied, errors were introduced by the human scribe. The difficulty in textual criticism of differing manuscripts of a single text is that it is not always immediately apparent which variant is original and which is an error. The task of the textual critic, therefore, is to sort through the variants and establish a "critical text" that is intended to represent the original by explaining best the state of all extant witness. In establishing the critical text, the text critic considers both "external" evidence (the age, provenance, and affiliation of each witness) and "internal" considerations (what the author and scribes were likely to have done).

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