ABSTRACT
Under the umbrella of scholarly editing are a variety of practices and approaches, which are defined by the way they handle the evidence offered by primary sources that include the text to be edited, the way they reconcile contrasting readings from different sources, the role of the editor and the importance given to authorial intention. Distinctions are also made by the nature of the materials to be edited, their age and the discipline within which they are edited. In particular, when a text is transmitted by more than one source, editors have to decide how to handle the contrasting readings that are witnessed by the documents to hand. It is beyond the scope of this publication to give a detailed account of the main theories and approaches available to textual scholars: this has already been done by David Greetham his excellent volume Textual Scholarship in 1992 and again in 2013, and, more synthetically, by Tanselle (1995a). It will be sufficient here to sketch only the main theoretical positions, which will become relevant to the discourse of the book.
