Editing Textual criticism (section)

{{Short description|Identification of textual variants}}
{{Redirect|Critical edition|critical editions of operatic scores|Critical edition (opera)}}
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[[Image:Carmina Cantabrigiensia Manuscr-C-fol436v.jpg|thumb|200px|[[Cambridge Songs|Carmina Cantabrigiensia]], Manuscript C, folio 436v, 11th century]]
'''Textual criticism'''{{efn|The term "'''textology'''", borrowed from {{langx|ru|Текстология}} / {{langx|uk|Текстологія}}, is sometimes used for studies of (Old) [[Church Slavonic]] and [[Old East Slavic literature|(Old) East Slavic texts]].}} is a branch of [[textual scholarship]], [[philology]], and [[literary criticism]] that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either [[manuscripts]] (mss) or of printed books. Such texts may range in dates from the earliest writing in [[cuneiform]], impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of a 21st-century author's work. Historically, [[scribes]] who were paid to copy documents may have been literate, but many were simply copyists, mimicking the shapes of letters without necessarily understanding what they meant.{{citation needed |reason= even if true, this will not hold for every era of manuscript reproduction, and so it is far too general|date=February 2022}} This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand.{{sfn|Ehrman|2005|p=46}} Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example, the censoring of printed work for political, religious or cultural reasons.

The objective of the textual critic's work is to provide a better understanding of the creation and historical transmission of the text and its variants. This understanding may lead to the production of a critical edition containing a scholarly curated text. If a scholar has several versions of a manuscript but no known original, then established methods of textual criticism can be used to seek to reconstruct the original text as closely as possible. The same methods can be used to reconstruct intermediate versions, or [[recension]]s, of a document's transcription history, depending on the number and quality of the text available.{{efn|"Textual Criticism is that process by which it is sought to determine the original text of a document or of a collection of documents, and to exhibit it, freed from all the errors, corruptions, and variations which it may have accumulated in the course of its transmission by successive copyings."{{sfn|Vincent|1899|p=1}}}}

On the other hand, the one original text that a scholar theorizes to exist is referred to as the [[urtext (Biblical studies)|urtext]] (in the context of [[Biblical studies]]), [[Archetype (textual criticism)|archetype]] or [[Autograph (manuscript)|autograph]]; however, there is not necessarily a single original text for every group of texts. For example, if a story was spread by [[oral tradition]], and then later written down by different people in different locations, the versions can vary greatly.

There are many approaches or methods to the practice of textual criticism, notably [[#Eclecticism|eclecticism]], [[#Stemmatics|stemmatics]], and [[#Copy-text editing|copy-text editing]]. Quantitative techniques are also used to determine the relationships between witnesses to a text, called textual witnesses, with methods from evolutionary biology ([[phylogenetics]]) appearing to be effective on a range of traditions.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Howe |first1=Christopher J. |last2=Connolly |first2=Ruth |last3=Windram |first3=Heather |title=Responding to criticisms of phylogenetic methods in stemmatology |journal=SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 |volume=52 |issue=1 |year=2012 |pages=51–67 |doi=10.1353/sel.2012.0008 |jstor=41349051 |s2cid=145665900 }}</ref>

In some domains, such as religious and classical text editing, the phrase "lower criticism" refers to textual criticism and "[[higher criticism]]" to the endeavor to establish the authorship, date, and place of composition of the original [[text (literary theory)|text]].