Chirographically transmitted texts constitute the basis of historically oriented research in the philological disciplines. Medievalists and textual scholars undertake the effort of studying a text’s transmission and of subsequently editing it to make it accessible to a wider scholarly readership. As editorial work prepares the very material that will be the object of further study, it is - and will remain to be - of eminent importance to all disciplines that draw on textual material as their primary source, viz. historical linguistics, literary studies and cultural history alike. At the same time, editions are not neutral – they reflect their editors’ views on texts and textuality and they affect the way in which texts will be received, read and studied by generations to come.
Remarkably, there is no broadly accepted methodological paradigm for text editing in palaeoslavistics and the question of methodology has too often remained implicit. The field is marked by the coexistence of different scholarly traditions, a situation which, unfortunately, has not lead to fertile methodological debate or to a rapprochement between different editorial strategies. Some editors apply traditional methods of textual criticism to arrive at the reconstruction of an archetypal text, while others, more inclined to a material - historical approach, regard reconstructive editions as falsifications of textual reality and therefore prefer to base their editions on single manuscripts. Each approach undoubtedly has its own strengths and weaknesses and the efficiency of a particular editorial strategy will always depend on the specific nature of the texts and their transmission on the one hand and on the editor’s objectives and prospective readership on the other.
Moreover, the technical innovation of the last decades has caused profound changes in the way we treat texts, both professionally and in our everyday life. This has not only opened up great opportunities for text editing, it has also raised huge expectations and has imposed new requirements on editions. Especially the rise of corpus linguistics and, in connection with it, the demand for large amounts of digitally encoded texts confront editors with new challenges. Today, editors cannot ignore the fresh perspectives offered by computer technology. At the same time, technology can by no means substitute linguistic, palaeographic, and text critical expertise or the human skills usually subsumed under the Latin term iudicium.
In our workshop we intend to bring together experienced editors of Slavonic texts in order to initiate a broad discussion from both the philological and the linguistic point of view on what information editions should - and can - supply and how they ought to be designed to meet the requirements of their prospective users. We also intend to stimulate a debate on whether methodological openness can be maintained or whether - and, if so, to what extent - standardisation is required, for instance to facilitate the incorporation of editions into large searchable databases. In this way, we hope to contribute to the finding of a common denominator of editorial tradition and technical innovation as well as to elaborate new concepts of text editing that fit into different domains of knowledge and research.
1. Editing and the Rendering of the Text (on reconstructive editions, copy text editions, MS based editions)
2. Editing Translated texts
3. Editing Old East Slavonic Texts
4. Editing in the Digital Age
Lara Sels
Vittorio Tomelleri
Friday, 11.12.