Research subject Textual Criticism/Editorial Philology within Classics

Textual criticism aims att establishing the text (wording) in written documents, chiefly from premodern times.

The texts studied by classical scholars are very old, being in some cases written over two thousand years ago. These texts were normally copied over the centuries, in early times on papyrus, then on parchment and later paper, before they finally ended up in a printed book. In the process of copying, different errors creep in, for instance, simple transcribing errors or misreadings, or marginal notes that mistakenly get copied into the main text, or whole pages or sections of a manuscript getting lost or displaced.

The task of the textual critic is to study all the extant sources of a text, assess the variant readings and versions, and finally to establish the text to be printed. To do so, various methods and criteria are applied, contingent on textual category and the purpose of the intended scholarly edition.

Textual critics, thus, work on textual interpretation in the broad sense: in order to choose the right variants, the editor must have a clear understanding of what the text means, both as far as language and the material media conveying it (codicology and palaeography) are concerned, but also with regards to its context, both the literary (genre, style, contemporary and earlier literature, etc) and the historical (the cultural milieu at the time of composition, etc.).

Our department has a long history in textual criticism, especially with regards to Latin, as may be seen in the series Studia Latina Stockholmiensia.

From 2008 to 2015 the department was home to the research project Ars edendi, financed by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund. The project, comprising scholars in both Greek and Latin, aimed to evaluate and develop methods for producing scholarly editions of specific types of medieval texts. The final report of the project may be downloaded here.  A short film about the project may be seen here.