History of textual criticism

From antiquity to the Renaissance

Until the 20th century the development of textual criticism was inevitably dominated by classical and biblical studies. The systematic study and practice of the subject originated in the 3rd century bce with the Greek scholars of Alexandria. Literary culture had before that time been predominantly oral, though books were in common use by the 5th century, and many texts had suffered damage because the idea of precise textual accuracy and reproduction was unfamiliar. The aim of the librarians of Alexandria was to collect and catalogue every extant Greek book and to produce critical editions of the most important together with textual and interpretative commentaries. Many such editions and commentaries did in fact appear. Alexandrian editing was distinguished above all by respect for the tradition; the text was constituted from the oldest and best copies available, and conjectural emendation was rigidly confined to the commentary, which was contained in a separate volume. An elaborate battery of critical signs was used to refer from text to commentary. These techniques were applied, though on a less ambitious scale, by Roman scholars to Latin texts. Fidelity to tradition was the chief legacy of ancient textual scholarship to later ages; the copyist was expected to reproduce his exemplar as exactly as he could, and correction was based on comparison with other copies, not on the unaided conjectural sagacity of the scribe. Such was the practice of the best monastic scriptoria such as that of Tours, or of the best scholars, such as Lupus of Ferrières (fl. 850). From about 1350, however, a change in attitude is evident, particularly in the West. What is often called the revival of learning was in reality a practical movement to enlist the heritage of classical antiquity in the service of the new Christian humanism. In order to make them usable (i.e., readable), texts were corrected freely and often arbitrarily by scholars, copyists, and readers (the three categories being in fact hardly distinguishable). At its best, as seen in the activities of a scholar like Demetrius Triclinius, later medieval and early Renaissance criticism verges on scientific scholarship, but such cases are exceptional. For the most part the correction of texts was a purely subjective display of taste, sometimes right but much more often wrong, and resting as a rule on nothing more solid than a superficial sense of elegance. In consequence, by the 1470s, when the first printed editions (editiones principes) of classical texts began to appear, most Greek and Latin authors were circulating in a textually debased condition, and it was manuscripts of this character that almost always served as copy for the early printers. Very little editing in any real sense of the word was done; the scholars who saw the editiones principes through the press generally confined themselves to superficial improvements.

From Politian to Cobet

This state of affairs entailed that down to the 19th century most critics were engaged not in establishing and emending texts on scientific principles but in correcting, in a necessarily unsystematic fashion, a vulgate or received text (lectio recepta) that was itself the product of an almost entirely haphazard process of variation and conjecture. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the manuscripts themselves, the basic materials of the investigation, were largely inaccessible to scholars. The Italian poet and scholar Politian, unlike most of his contemporaries, was aware that only through the identification and comparison of the best manuscripts could texts be improved; his notes and collations show that he understood the problem correctly as essentially one of control of the sources. What might have been done in this field is shown by his work, cut short by his early death, on the Florentine codex of Justinian’s Pandects. Many manuscripts were still privately owned, their very existence unknown to scholars; public libraries were few and published catalogues fewer; travel was difficult, expensive, and often dangerous. It was not until the twin disciplines of diplomatic and paleography were founded by the great Benedictine monks Mabillon and Montfaucon, and developed by their successors, that a critical use of the evidence became possible; and much of the evidence itself did not become available until after the Napoleonic Wars, when most of the private stock of manuscripts passed finally into public collections.

Some advances were taking place, slowly and unsystematically, in both the theory and practice of textual criticism. The history of critical method in this period is most profitably studied in the best editions of the best editors. The accepted method was to correct the text (i.e., the text of the last printed edition) codicum et ingenii ope—i.e., with the aid of the manuscript and printed sources and the critic’s own ingenuity. Divination was subordinated to authority, and any reading found in a manuscript or printed text was accounted superior to any conjecture, whatever its intrinsic merits. The first important departure from this pattern is seen in the edition of Catullus by J.J. Scaliger (1577), in which the possibilities of the genealogical method, already understood in principle by Politian and other Renaissance scholars, were exemplified by the demonstration that all the extant copies derived from a lost manuscript, whose orthography and provenance Scaliger was prepared to reconstruct. Almost equally significant was Richard Bentley’s edition of Horace (1711), in which for the first time the role of conjecture in the critical and editorial process was recognized and the tradition of producing a corrected version of the text of previous editors was decisively rejected. Bentley’s scholarship was greatly admired in the Netherlands, and the editions of the great Dutch Latinists J.F. Gronovius and N. Heinsius were informed by Bentleian principles. Under his influence there grew up what may be called an Anglo-Dutch school of criticism, the two most typical representatives of which were Richard Porson and C.G. Cobet. Its strength lay in sound judgment and good taste rooted in minute linguistic and metrical study; its weaknesses were an excessive reliance on analogical criteria and an indifference to German science and method. Its influence may still be seen in the empiricism that characterizes much critical work by English scholars.