This chapter is written under the assumption that the history of textual scholarship from its very beginnings to the digital age can be understood from three perspectives. These perspectives are not the perspectives of the historian who tries to grasp the development of textual scholarship, but rather the perspectives held by the practitioners of the art and science of editing texts, for scholars who edit, comment, and analyze texts written by other people. This chapter assumes that editors may choose to look backward, outward, or inward.

First, looking backward means to search for the origin of the text and to...

As observed in this beginning of the twenty-first century, the reality of “digital critical edition” is still too embryonic and too unstable, even though it is developing, to be considered only in its present state and to be adopted without wondering about its future. It is indeed a strange situation where one has the impression of leaving the familiar and well-established world of printed books for the adventure and the risks of a medium commonly described as immaterial, in perpetual evolution, and without rules. Let us dare state up front that the issue at stake is neither external nor temporary:...

The adoption of digital technologies has upset our relationship to texts and confronts us with the long history of critical edition underlying this relationship. The advent of the printing press had already put an end to the erratic fluctuation of texts that were subject to the hazards of physical or mechanical hand-copying. Many medieval manuscripts are assorted with maledictions issued by the author or the scribe against future counterfeiters, threatening them with leprosy or burning in hell. These curses illustrate well how the old scribal culture based its conception of the intrinsic uniqueness of the text on prescriptions and prohibitions...

In migrating their editorial work on literary resources from print to digital technology, researchers have heeded new challenges and ambitions for scholarly editions. This chapter addresses these objectives by looking at designs, aims, and uses of existing scholarly editions as they migrate from one media to another. The first part deals with issues and questions raised by the digital trend in scholarly text studies and with the shift in how historical texts are recorded, presented, and studied. Confronting the optimistic promises of added value that digital editions will bring to scholarly works, we explain through the concept of remediation how...

This chapter gives a brief overview of the background and development of markup systems—that is, formal languages for the representation of electronic documents.¹ The chapter focuses on aspects of markup technology that are particularly relevant to textual scholarship. It gives an introduction to some of the key concepts of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and considers some of their limitations, possibilities, and future potential.

This chapter is intended as an introduction to markup for textual scholars who are new to the subject. In order to assess the relevance or utility of markup to...

What happens to “critical editing” in the digital context?¹ What tells us that digital tools and media facilitate critical editing? Do digital media make critical editions more accessible and therefore more democratic? Does the quality of critical editions increase when they are produced with digital tools? These are some of the questions asked by the editors in the introduction to this volume, to which this chapter responds. It does so by invoking and describing a principle of editorial philology that for many will seem trivial, or, at least standard, while others may disagree with it. The principle we are talking...

This chapter gives a brief overview of the historical development of textual editing. While the practice of editing has a long history, it is commonly accepted that the foundation of editing as a scholarly or even scientific activity was created in the first half of the nineteenth century. From this time, strict and to a certain extent formal methods were being introduced in textual editing—notably, the use of shared errors. Yet, generally, textual editing remained a qualitative enterprise. From the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a search for more objective methods, and a number of mathematical...

The French writer Francois Bon recently described online the attitude of literary circles (writers, critics, publishers) when confronted with the changes brought about in editing and publishing with digital technology: “We are lost, we are afraid. The editing world is like a brick building that is being shaken and that trembles. [ … ] Internet is to blame: partly, if the possibility of choice and of finding points of reference bypasses mediation as it still existed ten years ago” (Bon 2006).¹ Indeed, in the last few years numerous European intellectuals have had the opportunity to voice their preoccupation concerning the...

Producing critical editions is a reputedly old and not particularly profitable scholarly activity that essentially amounts to establishing, annotating, and presenting a text. What benefit can be obtained, then, by scrutinizing it from the perspective of political economy—especially at a time when critical editions are at last entering the digital realm, whose immateriality seems to open up wide possibilities and advantages, free of charge, to all users?

On the contrary, we believe that textual scholarship would have much to gain from questioning itself in terms of political economy, which for ages was the main branch of economics but has...