Editing Textual criticism (section)

== Process ==
[[Image:P46.jpg|thumb|200px|Folio from [[Papyrus 46]], containing [[2 Corinthians]] 11:33–12:9]]
Before inexpensive mechanical printing, literature was copied by hand, and many variations were introduced by copyists. The age of printing made the scribal profession effectively redundant. Printed editions, while less susceptible to the proliferation of variations likely to arise during manual transmission, are nonetheless not immune to introducing variations from an author's autograph. Instead of a scribe miscopying his source, a compositor or a printing shop may read or typeset a work in a way that differs from the autograph.<ref>Gaskell, 1978.</ref> Since each scribe or printer commits different errors, reconstruction of the lost original is often aided by a selection of readings taken from many sources. An edited text that draws from multiple sources is said to be ''eclectic''. In contrast to this approach, some textual critics prefer to identify the single best surviving text, and not to combine readings from multiple sources.{{efn|"Tanselle thus combines an Aristotelian ''praktike'', a rigorous account of the phenomenology of text, with a deep Platonic suspicion of this phenomenology, and of the concrete world of experience (see my 'Materiality' for further discussion). For him—and, I would contend, for the idealist, or 'eclectic' editing with which he and Greg-Bowers are often identified, whereby an idealist 'text that never was' is constructed out of the corrupt states of extant documents—ontology is only immanent, never assuredly present in historical, particularized text, for it can be achieved only at the unattainable level of nous rather than phenomenon. Thus, even the high aims of eclectic (or, as it is sometimes known, 'critical') editing can be called into question, because of the unsure phenomenological status of the documentary and historical."{{sfn|Greetham|1999|p=40}}}}

When comparing different documents, or "witnesses", of a single, original text, the observed differences are called ''variant readings'', or simply ''variants'' or ''readings''. It is not always apparent which single variant represents the author's original work. The process of textual criticism seeks to explain how each variant may have entered the text, either by accident (duplication or omission) or intention (harmonization or censorship), as scribes or supervisors transmitted the original author's text by copying it. The textual critic's task, therefore, is to sort through the variants, eliminating those most likely to be ''un''-original, hence establishing a '''critical text''', or critical edition, that is intended to best approximate the original. At the same time, the critical text should document variant readings, so the relation of extant witnesses to the reconstructed original is apparent to a reader of the critical edition. In establishing the critical text, the textual critic considers both "external" evidence (the age, provenance, and affiliation of each witness) and "internal" or "physical" considerations (what the author and scribes, or printers, were likely to have done).{{sfn|Tanselle|1992|p=}}{{page needed|date=May 2023}}

The collation of all known variants of a text is referred to as a [[variorum]], namely a work of textual criticism whereby all variations and emendations are set side by side so that a reader can track how textual decisions have been made in the preparation of a text for publication.{{sfn|McGann|1992|p=xviiii}} The [[Bible]] and the works of [[William Shakespeare]] have often been the subjects of variorum editions, although the same techniques have been applied with less frequency to many other works, such as [[Walt Whitman]]'s ''[[Leaves of Grass]]'',<ref>Bradley 1990</ref>
and the prose writings of [[Edward FitzGerald (poet)|Edward Fitzgerald]].<ref>Bentham, Gosse 1902</ref>

In practice, citation of manuscript evidence implies any of several methodologies. The ideal, but most costly, method is physical inspection of the manuscript itself; alternatively, published photographs or [[facsimile]] editions may be inspected. This method involves [[Paleography|paleographical]] analysis—interpretation of handwriting, incomplete letters and even reconstruction of [[lacuna (manuscripts)|lacunae]]. More typically, editions of manuscripts are consulted, which have done this paleographical work already.{{citation needed|date=November 2022}}