Textual scholarship
Textual scholarship – sometimes also called “textual studies” – is a collective term for various disciplines studying, describing, transcribing, editing, and commenting upon texts. The variety of such disciplines covers, e.g., practically all fields of literary studies, textual criticism, book history, analytic and descriptive bibliography, , media studies, and even rather specialised fields like palaeography, codicology, and epigraphy. The topics, subjects, methods, theories, and practices of different approaches of textual scholarship vary significantly, but they all share the common interest in the genesis and transmission of texts. According to its broadest definition, textual scholarship deals with any aspect of any system of written marking on any surface.
References
– Fraistat, Neil, and Julia Flanders, eds. 2013. The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
– Greetham, David C. 1994. Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, vol. 1417. New York: Garland.
– Williams, William Proctor, and Craig S. Abbot. 2009. An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies. 4th ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America. – 1st ed. 1970.
In other languages
DE: Textforschung
FR: étude des textes
IT: scienze del testo / studio del testo