Scuola storica
An ecdotic perspective which developed in Italy in the thirties of the 20th century in the wake of Michele Barbi's and especially Giorgio Pasquali's approaches to textual criticism. In 1934 Pasquali published the first edition of a volume titled Storia della tradizione e critica del testo, in which he stressed the need to integrate the reconstruction of a stemma with the study of the history of tradition, and suggested that certain ambiguities in the transmission of Latin and vernacular texts could be explained by assuming ab origine the existence of authorial changes. The seminal force of the approach suggested by Pasquali lies in the fact that it injects history into the critically reconstructed text; as later on grasped by Contini (see, among others, Contini 1961), Pasquali’s historical view worked effectively as an antidote to the radical scepticism of Bédier in the face of an aura of “eternity” emanated by the stemma.
Pasquali's Storia della tradizione opened the path to what is frequently called "Neo-Lachmannism" or "Trans-Lachmannism" (see Neo-Lachmannian Philology, 1), an approach which does not reject the scientific rigour of the Lachmannian method, but rather reconsiders it critically, in the light of the more complex vision offered by the thorough study of the history of tradition. Pasquali argues that each textual problem requires a specific treatment. An editor's activity, in fact, is not mechanical, "rather, it is methodical - which means almost the opposite" (Storia della tradizione, p. xi).
Gianfranco Contini, D'Arco Silvio Avalle, Maria Corti and Cesare Segre are amongst the leading scholars in this school. One may quote Contini's famous statement according to which "in order to be a Lachmannian today, one should have passed through an anti-lachmannian training (Bédier) and a post-lachmannian experience (that is, in classical philology at least, Pasquali)." ("[...] come per essere oggi lachmanniani, sia indispensabile aver attraversato e un tirocinio anti-lachmanniano (cioè Bédier) e un'esperienza post-lachmanniana (cioè, se non altro in filologia classica, Pasquali)." Contini 1970, 344).
References
– Barbi, Michele. 1938. La nuova filologia e l'edizione dei nostri scrittori. Da Dante al Manzoni. Firenze: Sansoni.
– Buzzoni, Marina, and Eugenio Burgio. 2014. "The Italian ‘third way’ of editing between globalization and localization." In Internationalität und Interdisziplinarität der Editionswissenschaft, edited by Michael Stolz and Yen-Chun Chen. Berlin-Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 171–180.
– Contini, Gianfranco. 1961. "Tombeau de Leo Spitzer". Paragone 12: 3–12.
– Contini, Gianfranco. 1970. "La 'Vita' francese di sant'Alessio e l'arte di pubblicare i testi antichi." In Un augurio a Raffaele Mattioli. Firenze: Sansoni. 343–374.
– Chiarini, Giorgio. 1982. "Prospettive translachmanniane dell'ecdotica." In Ecdotica e testi ispanici. Verona: Fiorini, 45–64.
– Pasquali, Giorgio. 1934. Storia della tradizione e critica del testo. Firenze: Le Monnier. – 2nd revised edition 1952.
– Pugliatti, Paola. 1998. "Textual Perspectives in Italy: From Pasquali’s Historicism to the Challenge of ‘Variantistica’ (and Beyond)." In Text. An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies, vol 11, edited by W. Speed Hill, E. M. Burns, P. Schillingsburg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 155–188.
– Vàrvaro, Alberto. 1999. "The 'New Philology' from an Italian Perspective. In Text. An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies, vol. 12, edited by W. Speed Hill et al. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 49–58.
– Zinelli, Fabio. 2006. L'édition des textes médiévaux Italiens en Italie. In Pratiques philologiques en Europe, edited by Frederic Duval. Paris: École des Chartes, 77-113.