TEXTUAL CRITICISM

the study of a literary or other work for the purpose of establishing the original form or a single definitive form of its text. By text is meant the literary forms preserved in autograph or in transmitted form. Transmission may be as close as the immediate copy of an autograph or may be as distant as copies of copies to any degree; moreover, texts may be transmitted in written or in printed form (each generally defined) or in both. Transmitted texts share only one characteristic: their preserved forms were not written out by the author in any manner. When there is mixture, the transmitted and autograph parts are to be distinguished. In some few cases the problem of oral transmission will arise to complicate the usual written or printed line of transmission. Textual criticism encompasses not only classical, biblical, and medieval manuscripts and books but also modern works. Even authorial supervision and the most modern composition methods are not enough to assure an error-free text, and the author's real intention may be difficult to determine. One example is the many printer's errors in William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936) owing to the complex typography used to represent narrative levels. Occasionally deliberate correction or censorship must be undone, as in the case of novels by Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser and the published journals of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Lack of knowledge of language or subject matter and accidental damage or omission are other causes of variation in texts. Variation occurs any time a text is transmitted, whether in print, in manuscript, or orally. In the case of early printed books, variation occurs because printers did not emphasize textual accuracy. The problems with the study of manuscript transmission lie in establishing the genealogy of what may be a large number of handwritten versions, each textually unique. The variations that occur are not regarded as error; variation is a value-free term and describes only a difference between two readings. Whether texts have been copied many times over short or long periods, close in time to the original text or very long after it, from a lost or an extant originalall these are factors in reconstructing an authoritative original. When a text was originally transmitted orallyas were texts of Homer or the Provenal poetscritics often cannot reconstruct an original but must assume a common source. 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; 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 critictechnical, philological, literary, or aestheticare 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 manuscriptsthe so-called Dead Sea Scrollswere discovered in the caves of Qumran. Additional reading For oral transmission the fundamental work is H.M. and N.K. Chadwick, The Growth of Literature, 3 vol. (193240, reprinted 1969). Classical, biblical, and medieval texts are all covered (but somewhat unevenly) by H. Hunger et al., Geschichte der Textberlieferung der antiken und mittelalterlichen Literatur, 2 vol. (196164). 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, Trait 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 applique aux textes latins (1911), an exhaustive catalogue raisonn 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.), 2:273290; see also J.A. Asher, Truth and Fiction: The Text of Medieval Manuscripts, Aumla, 25:616 (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, Mmoire sur l'tablissement du texte de la Vulgate (1922), Essais de critique textuelleecdotique (1926); J. Burke Severs, Quentin's Theory of Textual Criticism, English Inst. Annual 1941, pp. 6593 (1942); J. Bedier, La tradition manuscrite du Lai de L'Ombre: Rflexions sur l'art d'diter les anciens textes, Romania, 54:16196, 32156 (1928). A. Castellani, Bdier 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., 3:6395 (1950). For further discussion of these developments, see W.P. Shepard, Recent Theories of Textual Criticism, Mod. Philol., 28:129141 (1930); J. Andrieu, Principes et recherches en critique textuelle, in Mmorial des tudes latines . . . J. Marouzeau, pp. 45874 (1943); E.B. Ham, Textual Criticism and Common Sense, Romance Philol., 12:198215 (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., 25:101138 (1968); Numerical Taxonomy and Some Primary Manuscripts of the Gospels, J. Theol. Stud., 20:390406 (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, Abbrviations latines et signes raccommands pour l'apparat critique des ditions des textes mdivaux, Bull. de la soc. int. pour l'tude de la philosophie md., 2:142149 (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, Einfhrung 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., 18:6784 (1922), a brilliant polemic against hard-and-fast rules of criticism; L. Bieler, The Grammarian's Craft, Folia, 10:342 (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.