Recensions

In textual criticism, a recension is a revised or edited version of a text produced by revising, compiling, or updating an earlier form. A recension represents a distinct textual tradition that emerges through deliberate editorial work and may reflect specific linguistic, doctrinal, or liturgical priorities. Recensions can result from modernization, harmonization of readings, or the incorporation of later material into an earlier base text.

The term derives from Latin recensio, meaning a reviewing or revision. It is widely used in classical philology, religious studies, and historical text criticism to describe a particular lineage of a text rather than a single manuscript or edition.

Scholars identify recensions by comparing manuscripts and early editions to detect characteristic readings, organizational changes, or doctrinal alterations that define a given tradition. A recension may arise from a single editor or from a transmission system in which editors repeatedly revise and combine contents from multiple sources. Methods such as stemmatics and the study of edition histories help delineate different recensions and their relationships to one another.

Recensions are valuable for understanding how texts evolved over time and how reception, controversy, or liturgical use shaped their wording. They aid attempts to reconstruct earlier forms of a work and illuminate how editorial choices affect interpretation. The concept is applied across disciplines to ancient epics, religious scriptures, and classical literature, though the exact meaning and significance of a recension can vary with the text and scholarly context.

Notes on usage can be nuanced; not every revision constitutes a distinct recension, and the boundaries between recensions and editions or manuscript families are often debated.