Textual criticism

Textual criticism compares surviving copies of a work to reconstruct their relationships and establish, as far as possible, an authoritative text.

Textual witness: A document or other source that preserves a version of a text. Each surviving copy is a witness whose readings contribute evidence to an edition.
Manuscript: A document written by hand rather than produced through printing or digital reproduction. Many textual witnesses survive as handwritten manuscripts, each with its own copying history.
Biblical textual criticism: The study of biblical manuscripts and versions to establish the wording and transmission of biblical texts. Its extensive manuscript traditions make reconstruction central to biblical scholarship.
Diplomatic transcription: A transcription that represents a source’s wording and features with minimal editorial normalization. It records a particular witness rather than reconstructing a text from multiple witnesses.
Textual variant: A difference in wording or form among witnesses to the same work. Variants are the evidence compared to infer copying relationships and recover readings.
Paleography: The study of historical handwriting and the practices used to read it. Reading manuscripts accurately can reveal letters, abbreviations, corrections, and dates.
New Testament textual criticism: The comparison of Greek and other witnesses to reconstruct the earliest attainable text of the New Testament. Its large body of variant readings illustrates both the power and limits of reconstruction.
Copy-text editing: An editorial approach that uses one selected witness as the base text while consulting others for correction. It privileges a chosen copy instead of assembling every reading independently.
Stemmatics: A method that reconstructs relationships among textual witnesses by analyzing shared errors and variants. It represents inferred copying relationships as a family tree of witnesses.
Codicology: The study of books as physical objects, including their materials, structure, and production. A witness’s physical construction can expose how and when its text was copied.

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