Editing Textual criticism (section)

== History ==
Textual criticism has been practiced for over two thousand years, as one of the [[philology|philological]] arts.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Cours de linguistique générale|last=Saussure |first=Ferdinand de|publisher=Charles Bally in Payot C|year=1916|isbn=9782228500647|location=Lausanne|pages=1–3}}</ref> Early textual critics, especially the librarians of [[History of Alexandria#Ptolemaic era|Hellenistic Alexandria]] in the last two centuries BC, were concerned with preserving the works of [[ancient history|antiquity]], and this continued through the [[Middle Ages]] into the [[early modern period]] and the invention of the [[printing press]]. Textual criticism was an important aspect of the work of many [[Renaissance humanism|Renaissance humanists]], such as [[Desiderius Erasmus]], who edited the Greek [[New Testament]], creating what developed as the ''[[Textus Receptus]]''. In Italy, scholars such as [[Petrarch]] and [[Poggio Bracciolini]] collected and edited many Latin manuscripts, while a new spirit of critical enquiry was boosted by the attention to textual states, for example in the work of [[Lorenzo Valla]] on the purported [[Donation of Constantine]].{{citation needed|date=May 2023}}

Many ancient works, such as the [[Bible]] and the [[Greek tragedy|Greek tragedies]], survive in hundreds of copies, and the relationship of each copy to the original may be unclear. Textual scholars have debated for centuries which sources are most closely derived from the original, hence which readings in those sources are correct.{{citation needed|date=March 2015}} Although texts such as Greek plays presumably had one original, the question of whether some biblical books, like the [[Gospel]]s, ever had just one original has been discussed.{{sfn|Tanselle|1992|p=}}{{page needed|date=May 2023}} Interest in applying textual criticism to the [[Quran]] has also developed after the discovery of the [[Sana'a manuscripts]] in 1972, which possibly date back to the seventh to eighth centuries.{{citation needed|date=May 2023}}

In the English language, the works of [[William Shakespeare]] have been a particularly fertile ground for textual criticism—both because the texts, as transmitted, contain a considerable amount of variation, and because the effort and expense of producing superior editions of his works have always been widely viewed as worthwhile.<ref>Jarvis 1995, pp. 1–17</ref> The principles of textual criticism, although originally developed and refined for works of antiquity and the Bible, and, for Anglo-American Copy-Text editing, Shakespeare,<ref>Montgomery 1997</ref> have been applied to many works, from (near-)contemporary texts to the earliest known written documents. Ranging from ancient [[Mesopotamia]] and [[Ancient Egypt|Egypt]] to the twentieth century, textual criticism covers a period of about five millennia.{{citation needed|date=May 2023}}