A Rationale of Textual Criticism

Stemmatics and copy-text editing—while both eclectic, in that they permit the editor to select readings from multiple sources—sought to reduce subjectivity by establishing one or a few witnesses, presumably as more "objective" criteria. Stemmatics or stemmatology is a rigorous approach to textual criticism.

Karl Lachmann — greatly contributed to making this method famous, even though he did not invent it see Timpanaro, The genesis of Lachmann's method. The method takes its name from the stemma , "family tree," which shows the relationships of the surviving witnesses.

The family tree is also referred to as a cladorama. Relations between the lost intermediates are determined by the same process, placing all extant manuscripts in a family tree or stemma codicum descended from a single archetype. The process of constructing the stemma is called recension, or the Latin recensio. Having completed the stemma, the critic proceeds to the next step, called selection or selectio, where the text of the archetype is determined by examining variants from the closest hyparchetypes to the archetype and selecting the best ones.

Textual criticism - Wikipedia

If one reading occurs more often than another at the same level of the tree, then the dominant reading is selected. If two competing readings occur equally often, then the editor uses his judgment to select the correct reading. After selectio, the text may still contain errors, since there may be passages where no source preserves the correct reading. The step of examination, or examinatio is applied to find corruptions.

Where the editor concludes that the text is corrupt, it is corrected by a process called "emendation," or emendatio also sometimes called divinatio.

What is the ‘Text’ in Textual Criticism?

Emendations not supported by any known source are sometimes called conjectural emendations. The process of selectio resembles eclectic textual criticism, but applied to a restricted set of hypothetical hyparchetypes. The steps of examinatio and emendatio resemble copy-text editing. In fact, the other techniques can be seen as special cases of stemmatics, but in which a rigorous family history of the text cannot be determined but only approximated.

If it seems that one manuscript is by far the best text, then copy text editing is appropriate, and if it seems that a group of manuscripts are good, then eclecticism on that group would be proper. The stemmatic method assumes that each witness is derived from one, and only one, predecessor.

If a scribe refers to more than one source when creating his copy, then the new copy will not clearly fall into a single branch of the family tree. In the stemmatic method, a manuscript that is derived from more than one source is said to be contaminated. The method also assumes that scribes only make new errors; they do not attempt to correct the errors of their predecessors. When a text has been improved by the scribe, it is said to be sophisticated, but "sophistication" impairs the method by obscuring a document's relationship to other witnesses, and making it more difficult to place the manuscript correctly in the stemma.

The stemmatic method requires the textual critic to group manuscripts by commonality of error. It is required, therefore, that the critic can distinguish erroneous readings from correct ones. This assumption has often come under attack. Greg noted, "That if a scribe makes a mistake he will inevitably produce nonsense is the tacit and wholly unwarranted assumption. He surveyed editions of medieval French texts that were produced with the stemmatic method, and found that textual critics tended overwhelmingly to produce trees divided into just two branches. He concluded that this outcome was unlikely to have occurred by chance, and that therefore, the method was tending to produce bipartite stemmas regardless of the actual history of the witnesses.

He suspected that editors tended to favor trees with two branches, as this would maximize the opportunities for editorial judgment as there would be no third branch to "break the tie" whenever the witnesses disagreed. He also noted that, for many works, more than one reasonable stemma could be postulated, suggesting that the method was not as rigorous or as scientific as its proponents had claimed. The stemmatic method's final step is emendatio, also sometimes referred to as "conjectural emendation. Some of the method's rules that are designed to reduce the exercise of editorial judgment do not necessarily produce the correct result.

For example, where there are more than two witnesses at the same level of the tree, normally the critic will select the dominant reading. However, it may be no more than fortuitous that more witnesses have survived that present a particular reading. A plausible reading that occurs less often may, nevertheless, be the correct one. Lastly, the stemmatic method assumes that every extant witness is derived, however remotely, from a single source. It does not account for the possibility that the original author may have revised his work, and that the text could have existed at different times in more than one authoritative version.

When copy-text editing, the scholar fixes errors in a base text, often with the help of other witnesses. Often, the base text is selected from the oldest manuscript of the text, but in the early days of printing, the copy text was often a manuscript that was at hand. Using the copy-text method, the critic examines the base text and makes corrections called emendations in places where the base text appears wrong to the critic. This can be done by looking for places in the base text that do not make sense or by looking at the text of other witnesses for a superior reading. Close-call decisions are usually resolved in favor of the copy-text.

The first published, printed edition of the Greek New Testament was produced by this method. Erasmus — , the editor, selected a manuscript from the local Dominican monastery in Basle and corrected its obvious errors by consulting other local manuscripts. The Westcott and Hort text, which was the basis for the Revised Version of the English Bible, also used the copy-text method, using the Codex Vaticanus as the base manuscript.

The bibliographer Ronald B. McKerrow introduced the term copy-text in his edition of the works of Thomas Nashe, defining it as "the text used in each particular case as the basis of mine. In McKerrow's method as originally introduced, the copy-text was not necessarily the earliest text. In some cases, McKerrow would choose a later witness, noting that "if an editor has reason to suppose that a certain text embodies later corrections than any other, and at the same time has no ground for disbelieving that these corrections, or some of them at least, are the work of the author, he has no choice but to make that text the basis of his reprint.

By , in his Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare, McKerrow had changed his mind about this approach, as he feared that a later edition—even if it contained authorial corrections—would "deviate more widely than the earliest print from the author's original manuscript. Anglo-American textual criticism in the last half of the twentieth century came to be dominated by a landmark essay by Sir Walter W. Greg, "The Rationale of Copy-Text. Greg observed that compositors at printing shops tended to follow the "substantive" readings of their copy faithfully, except when they deviated unintentionally; but that "as regards accidentals they will normally follow their own habits or inclination, though they may, for various reasons and to varying degrees, be influenced by their copy.

The true theory is, I contend, that the copy-text should govern generally in the matter of accidentals, but that the choice between substantive readings belongs to the general theory of textual criticism and lies altogether beyond the narrow principle of the copy-text. Thus it may happen that in a critical edition the text rightly chosen as copy may not by any means be the one that supplies most substantive readings in cases of variation.

The failure to make this distinction and to apply this principle has naturally led to too close and too general a reliance upon the text chosen as basis for an edition, and there has arisen what may be called the tyranny of the copy-text, a tyranny that has, in my opinion, vitiated much of the best editorial work of the past generation.

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Greg's view, in short, was that the "copy-text can be allowed no over-riding or even preponderant authority so far as substantive readings are concerned. Although Greg argued that an editor should be free to use his judgment to choose between competing substantive readings, he suggested that an editor should defer to the copy-text when "the claims of two readings … appear to be exactly balanced. Editors who follow Greg's rationale produce eclectic editions, in that the authority for the "accidentals" is derived from one particular source usually the earliest one that the editor considers to be authoritative, but the authority for the "substantives" is determined in each individual case according to the editor's judgment.

The resulting text, except for the accidentals, is constructed without relying predominantly on any one witness.

A rationale of textual criticism

Greg did not live long enough to apply his rationale of copy-text to any actual editions of works. His rationale was adopted and significantly expanded by Fredson Bowers — Starting in the s, G. Thomas Tanselle — vigorously took up the method's defense and added significant contributions of his own. Whereas Greg had limited his illustrative examples to English Renaissance drama, where his expertise lay, Bowers argued that the rationale was "the most workable editorial principle yet contrived to produce a critical text that is authoritative in the maximum of its details whether the author be Shakespeare , Dryden , Fielding , Nathaniel Hawthorne , or Stephen Crane.

The principle is sound without regard for the literary period. Citing the example of Nathaniel Hawthorne, he noted:. When an author's manuscript is preserved, this has paramount authority, of course. Yet the fallacy is still maintained that since the first edition was proofread by the author, it must represent his final intentions and hence should be chosen as copy-text.

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Practical experience shows the contrary. When one collates the manuscript of The House of the Seven Gables against the first printed edition, one finds an average of ten to fifteen differences per page between the manuscript and the print, many of them consistent alterations from the manuscript system of punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and word-division.

It would be ridiculous to argue that Hawthorne made approximately three to four thousand small changes in proof, and then wrote the manuscript of The Blithedale Romance according to the same system as the manuscript of the Seven Gables, a system that he had rejected in proof. Following Greg, the editor would then replace any of the manuscript readings with substantives from printed editions that could be reliably attributed to the author: McKerrow had articulated textual criticism's goal in terms of "our ideal of an author's fair copy of his work in its final state.

Bowers and Tanselle argue for rejecting textual variants that an author inserted at the suggestion of others. Bowers said that his edition of Stephen Crane 's first novel, Maggie, presented "the author's final and uninfluenced artistic intentions. Tanselle discusses the example of Herman Melville 's Typee.

After the novel's initial publication, Melville's publisher asked him to soften the novel's criticisms of missionaries in the South Seas. Although Melville pronounced the changes an improvement, Tanselle rejected them in his edition, concluding that. Bowers confronted a similar problem in his edition of Maggie. Creative Writing and the Radical.

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