What is textual criticism?

Textual criticism is an age-old branch of scholarship that deals with the tangled web of texts left to us by history. The versions of The Iliad, the Bible, and The Canterbury Tales that we read in classes, in church, and in recreation, are all the products of painstaking labor done by generations of textual critics. Why is such labor necessary? Take the New Testament as an example. We do not have the originals of the New Testament. As textual critic Bart Ehrman writes,

Not only do we not have the originals, we don't have the first copies of the originals. We don't even have the copies of the copies, or the copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later. In most instances, they are copies made centuries later. And all these copies differ from one another, in many thousands of places…these copies differ from one another in so many places that we don't even know how many differences there are. Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament (10).

It is the job of textual critics to make this complexity comprehensible, and they traditionally attempt to do so in one of two methods. In "documentary editing," textual critics become the stewards and ambassadors of this complexity: it is their job to find, study, organize, and present every variation. In "critical editing," textual critics seek to clean away the accumulated vagaries of time and recover the text of the author - or, at least, come as close as they can. These two aspects of textual criticism - documentary versus critical, inclusive versus selective - have, for thousands of years, frequently come into conflict with one another. However, the great benefit of digital media is that it allows both philosophies of textual criticism to coexist and benefit from one another: the Archive provides both documentary transcripts of individual manuscripts and critical editions of Langland's poem, making a fruitful "both/and" situation out of what has so often, in the era of print, been a case of "either/or."

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