ABSTRACT
This chapter formulates propositions about the audience, nature, function and status of the scholarly edition that lead to a seventh proposition about the electronic edition as the ideal maximal medium for the inclusion of the minimal edition, even in printable form. The text-critical edition presents itself explicitly as a reading edition but contains elements which are traditionally found in a study edition. The purpose of the edition is to inform the interested reader rather than provide a forum for the textual scholar to demonstrate the results of their research. In the Anglo-American tradition, the acknowledgement of the scholarly editors' subjective critical judgements and the articulation of the editors' freedom to apply their theory of the text in editing has referred the concept of the definitive text to the annals of scholarly editing and introduced different editorial or formal orientations.
