Textual criticism - Topics

Why a scribe's marginal note sometimes drifts into the text What a critical apparatus records and what it quietly drops How a cancel leaf exposes a publisher's late correction How palaeographers separate a ninth-century hand from a twelfth-century imitation Why two scribes copying one text leave different letter shapes at line ends Why a stemma is built from shared errors rather than shared readings How digital collation changed the pace of comparing witnesses What an editor gives up by trusting a single best manuscript Why a critical edition can be copyrighted when its author died centuries ago How lectio difficilior stops scribes from smoothing hard readings away How contamination ruins a clean stemma How scribes marked a correction with expunction and subpunction How much of an argument may rest on a single manuscript? Why dating a manuscript by its script is an argument from probability What gets lost when an idea is lifted out of the text that carried it? Deciding whether a variant is a scribal slip or the author's revision When editors print a word that no surviving manuscript contains Reconstruction and conjecture differ mainly in how much of the work they show Why the quarto and folio King Lear may record two different plays Originalism and living constitutionalism are theories of reading before they are politics How enjambment changes meaning by withholding the pause Which edition of the Iliad am I actually reading? Reading a critical apparatus is a skill nobody teaches you in first-year Greek Why 5800 Greek manuscripts make New Testament editing statistical Editing a text is an argument about what the author meant A critical edition of an opera has to choose between the composer's manuscript and the version singers performed What does calling a text inspired actually claim about its author? Why the Orchid Pavilion Preface survives only in traced copies