tekstkritikk

Tekstkritikk, or textual criticism, is the scholarly study of how texts are transmitted across manuscripts and editions, with the aim of establishing a text that best reflects the author’s original wording. The field analyzes the history of a text as it exists in copies and prints, identifying scribal errors, intentional changes, and other variants that arise during transmission. It is applied to literary works as well as religious, legal, and philosophical documents, and its outcomes inform the creation of reliable editions and informed interpretation.

A central activity is collating and comparing textual witnesses—manuscripts, early editions, and other copies—to assess external evidence (age, provenance, copyist habits) and internal evidence (style, plausibility of readings, likelihood of corruption). Editors decide how to render the text in scholarly editions and how to document editorial choices through an apparatus criticus that lists significant variants and emendations. Editorial strategies range from eclectic editions, which select readings from multiple witnesses, to stemmatic approaches that aim to reconstruct an original base text.

Methods include stemmatics, textual criticism of variants, paleography, and linguistic analysis. In the digital age, computational tools for variant databases and TEI-encoded editions have broadened the field’s capabilities. The usual outputs are a critical edition, a textual apparatus, and accompanying notes or commentaries, sometimes complemented by translations.

History and scope: Textual criticism has ancient roots but matured in modern philology during the 18th–19th centuries, with key developments in manuscript-based methods such as the Lachmannian approach. Today it also embraces digital methods and collaborative editing to improve access and transparency. See also textual criticism, philology, and critical edition.