Recension is the practice of editing or revising a text based on critical analysis. When referring to

manuscript A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has ...

s, this may be a revision by another author. The term is derived from the

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

("review, analysis"). In

textual criticism Textual criticism 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 rang ...

(as is the case with Biblical scholarship), the count noun ''recension'' is a family of manuscripts sharing similar traits; for example, the Alexandrian text-type may be referred to as the "Alexandrian recension". The term ''recension'' may also refer to the process of collecting and analyzing source texts in order to establish a tree structure leading backward to a hypothetical original text. "An adequate method of recension has only been rendered possible by the growth of Palaeography, i.e. the scientific study of ancient documents – the hands in which they are written, the age to which they belong and generally speaking the purposes, methods and circumstances of the men who produced them." F. W. Hall (1913
A Companion to Classical Texts
chapter 6, via

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

References

Textual criticism Textual scholarship {{Manuscript-stub sr:Рецензија

See also

References