textual criticism, the technique of restoringtexts as nearly as possible to their original form. Texts in this connection are defined as writings other than formal documents, inscribed or printed on paper, parchment, papyrus, or similar materials. The study of formal documents such as deeds and charters belongs to thescience known as “diplomatics”; the study of writings on stone is part of epigraphy; while inscriptions on coins and seals are the province of numismatics and sigillography.

Textualcriticism, properly speaking, is anancillary academicdiscipline designed to lay the foundations for the so-called higher criticism, which deals with questions of authenticity andattribution, of interpretation, and of literary and historical evaluation. This distinction between the lower and the higher branches of criticism was first made explicitly by the German biblical scholarJ.G. Eichhorn; the first use of the term “textual criticism” in English dates from the middle of the 19th century. In practice the operations of textual and “higher” criticism cannot be rigidly differentiated: at the very outset of his work a critic, faced with variant forms of a text, inevitably employs stylistic and othercriteria belonging to the “higher” branch. The methods of textual criticism, insofar as they are not codified common sense, are the methods of historical inquiry. Texts have been transmitted in an almost limitless variety of ways, and the criteria employed by the textual critic—technical, philological, literary, or aesthetic—are valid only if applied in awareness of the particular set of historical circumstances governing each case.

An acquaintance with the history of texts and the principles of textual criticism is indispensable for the student of history,literature, or philosophy. Written texts supply the main foundation for thesedisciplines, and some knowledge of the processes of theirtransmission is necessary for understanding and control of the scholar’s basic materials. For the advanced student the criticism and editing of texts offers an unrivalled philological training and a uniquely instructive avenue to the history of scholarship; it is broadly true that all advances inphilology have been made in connection with the problems of editing texts. To say this is to recognize that the equipment needed by the critic for his task includes a mastery of the whole field of study within which his text lies; for the editing of Homer (to take an extreme case), a period of some 3,000 years. For the general reader the benefits of textual criticism are less apparent but are nevertheless real. Most men are apt to take texts on trust, even to prefer a familiar version, however debased or unauthentic, to the true one. The reader who resists all change is exemplified byErasmus’s story of the priest who preferred his nonsensicalmumpsimus to the correctsumpsimus. Such people are saved from themselves by the activities of the textual critic.

The law ofdiminishing returns operates in the textual field as in others: improvements in the texts of the great writers cannot be made indefinitely. Yet a surprisingly large number of texts have not yet been edited satisfactorily. This is particularly true ofmedieval literature, but also of many modern novels. Indeed the basic materials of most textual investigation, the manuscripts themselves, have as yet not all been identified and catalogued, much less systematically exploited. The first edition of the works of Dickens to be founded on critical study of the textual evidence did not begin to appear until 1966, whenK. Tillotson’s edition ofOliver Twist was published. Reliable principles of Shakespearean editing have begun to emerge only with modern developments in the techniques ofanalytical bibliography. TheRevised Standard Version of the Bible (1952) and theNew English Bible (1970) both incorporate readings of theOld Testament unknown before 1947, the year in which early biblical manuscripts—the so-calledDead Sea Scrolls—were discovered in the caves of Qumrān.

The materials of the investigation

Thepremise of the textual critic’s work is that whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasionally perverse. Variation can occur in several ways: through mechanical damage or accidental omission; through misunderstanding due to changes in fashions of writing; through ignorance of language or subject matter; through inattention or stupidity; and through deliberate efforts at correction. The task of the textual critic is to detect and, so far as possible, undo these effects. His concern is with the reconstruction of what no longer exists. A text is not a concreteartifact, like a pot or a statue, but an abstract concept or idea. The original text of Aeschylus’sAgamemnon or Horace’sOdes has perished; what survives is a number of derived forms or states of the text, approximations of varying reliability preserved by tradition. The critic must reduce these approximations as nearly as possible to the first or original state that they imperfectly represent; or if, as sometimes happens for reasons that will be explained below, no single original can be reconstructed or postulated, he must reduce their number to the lowest possible figure. His methods and the degree of his success will be determined by the nature of the individual problem—i.e., the text itself and the circumstances of itstransmission. The range of possible situations is vast, as the following survey indicates. The types of text with which the critic is concerned may be classified broadly under three heads.