Peter Schäfer, “Current Views on the Editing of Rabbinic Texts of Late Antiquity: Reflections on a Debate after Twenty Years,” in Martin Goodman and Philip Alexander, eds., Rabbinic Texts and the History of Late-Roman Palestine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 79-82 (original) (raw)

The Tradition of Manuscripts: A New Approach

The Heythrop Journal, 1978

The editor of a text preserved in an extensive tradition is confronted continually by disagreement among the manuscripts. Each variant reading may be evaluated by two types of criterion: (a) its intrinsic worth (how well it explains the origin of its rivals, and harmonizes with what is known from elsewhere of the author's usage), and (b) the character of and relationship between the witnesses which attest it. Our aim here is to extend the use of the latter sort of consideration, aptly termed 'distributional' by A.A. Hill,' though not at the expense of the former.

Editing Medieval Latin Text: Unusual Texts and the Need of New Type of Editions

Experience 1 will prove that when editing a Medieval Latin text in most cases one will be dealing with an exceptional or anomalous example, at least if our idea of normality is linked to the transmission and tradition of classical, Greek and Latin, texts, on which the so called Lachmann's method has been refined. Beyond anomalies in composition, which can characterize texts and writers of any time and century, there are two peculiarities that distinguish the tradition of the Medieval Latin texts (and, consequently, the editing work) from classical works.

Open Recensions, Textus Recepti, and the Problems of Edition

2016

The paper surveys the concept and practice of correction (διόρθωσις, emendatio) in classical and mediaeval times as evidence for the belief in a “correct” text and the possibility of maintaining it. This leads to controlled transmission of texts, open recensions and the impossibility of reconstructing an archetype. The actual effects of this are illustrated through the Slavonic text of the Catholic Epistles. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications for editorial practice, and a plea for the sharing of experience across disciplines.

The Genealogy of Scribal Versions: A Fourth Way in Medieval Editorial Theory

Textual Cultures: Text, Contexts, Interpretation, 2006

Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people. On the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations-or conversely, the complete reversals-the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents" (Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History") 1