ABSTRACT
Textual scholarship (and digital textual scholarship) engages with texts transmitted across time by means of mainly physical supports. 1 These supports can be made of different material (paper, papyrus, parchment, stones, fabric, wood, etc.) and can be handcrafted (manuscripts, epigraphy), or mechanically produced (printed books). Each combination of the above presents its own issues and problems, and requires specialised expertise and experience to be understood in full. Can a text be separated from the physical object on which it is inscribed without loss of information? The whole idea of transmission, edition and distribution of texts from the invention of writing requires us to answer ‘yes’ to this question. For centuries, if not millennia, human civilisation has relied on the fact that text can be transmitted independently from the document in which it was originally inscribed by its ‘author’. On the other hand, it has been clear for millennia, again, that ‘without loss’ is a utopian statement and since the establishment of the philological school of Alexandria, scholars have tried to find the rules and principles to fix mistakes, record different readings, and restore the ‘original’ version of a given text – whatever meaning is given to the word ‘original’. Traditionally, we date the birth of textual scholarship with the work of the scholars at the library of Alexandria and from the edition of the Iliad by Aristarchus (200 BCE). From the very beginning, what struck those scholars was the discovery that, comparing any two manuscripts of allegedly the same work, the texts contained within these documents were different, in some cases considerably so. Since then it has been the purpose of textual scholarship to make sense of this variation, to discover the reasons for which variation occurs and to reconcile this with the need of providing reliable and correct texts to the readers. What ‘correct’ actually means defines the different theories of textual scholarship.
