Textual scholarship (or textual studies) is an
umbrella term for disciplines that deal with describing, transcribing, editing or annotating
text
Text may refer to:
Written word
* Text (literary theory), any object that can be read, including:
**Religious text, a writing that a religious tradition considers to be sacred
**Text, a verse or passage from scripture used in expository preachin ...
s and physical
document
A document is a written, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often the manifestation of non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from the Latin ''Documentum'', which denotes a "teaching" o ...
s.
Overview
Textual research is mainly historically oriented. Textual
scholars study, for instance, how writing practices and printing technology have developed, how a certain writer has written and revised his or her texts, how literary documents have been edited, the history of reading culture, as well as censorship and the authenticity of texts. The subjects, methods and theoretical backgrounds of textual research vary widely, but what they have in common is an interest in the genesis and derivation of texts and textual variation in these practices.
Many textual scholars are interested in author intention while others seek to see how text is transmitted. Textual scholars often produce their own editions of what they discovered.
Disciplines of textual scholarship include, among others,
textual criticism
Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts or of printed books. Such texts may range in da ...
,
stemmatology,
paleography,
genetic criticism,
bibliography and
history of the book. Textual scholar
David Greetham has described textual scholarship as a term encompassing "the procedures of enumerative bibliographers, descriptive, analytical, and historical bibliographers, paleographers and codicologists, textual editors, and annotators-cumulatively and collectively". Some disciplines of textual scholarship focus on certain material sources or text genres, such as
epigraphy,
codicology and
diplomatics
Diplomatics (in American English, and in most anglophone countries), or diplomatic (in British English), is a scholarly discipline centred on the critical analysis of documents: especially, historical documents. It focuses on the conventions, p ...
.
The historical roots of textual scholarship date back to the 3rd century BCE, when the scholarly activities of copying, comparing, describing and archiving texts became professionalized in the
Library of Alexandria.
[Katajamäki, Sakari & Karina Lukin:]
Textual Trails from Oral to Written Sources: An Introduction
. In: Lukin, Karina, Frog & Sakari Katajamäki (eds.), Limited Sources, Boundless Possibilities. Textual Scholarship and the Challenges of Oral and Written Texts. '' RMN Newsletter'' No 7, December 2013.
See also
*
Text publication society
A text publication society is a learned society which publishes (either as its sole function, or as a principal function) scholarly editions of old works of historical or literary interest, or archival documents. In addition to full texts, a text p ...
References
Further reading
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* {{cite book, doi=10.9783/9780812200423, title=A Rationale of Textual Criticism, year=1992, last1=Tanselle, first1=G. Thomas, isbn=9780812200423
External links
The Society for Textual ScholarshipThe European Society for Textual Scholarship (ESTS)
Academic disciplines