Ecdotic

The name ecdotics, textual criticism or minor criticism is a branch of philology whose mission is to edit texts in the most faithful way possible to the original or to the will of the author, trying mainly to eliminate transcription errors. To do this, he uses a broad philological instrumental that is highly codified and experienced for thousands of years since the time of the Museum of Alexandria, as well as a series of auxiliary disciplines such as codicology, paleography or library science. The editions that are carried out with ecdotic criteria are called critical editions, in the strict sense when they exhaust through the study the transmission and the possibilities of determining the text and its various lessons, or more broadly philological editions. Scribes, scribes, and copyists often made errors or alterations in calligraphically transcribing manuscripts. Given one or more copies of a manuscript, but not the original, textual criticism aims to reconstruct a text as close to the lost original as possible.

Textual criticism has to face problems related to Authorship, Dating or dating and Edition itself. The critical process, which is resolved expository in the configuration of an apparatus, has its key moments in the recensio, the emendatio and the establishment of the stemma or family tree of the work.

Ecdotics is of singular importance for the edition of ancient texts and those transmitted in a fragmentary or incomplete way, the original of which may have disappeared, and of which we only have copies that often differ from each other. It is applied to the reconstruction of texts that have been distorted by the passage of time, the handwritten tradition, the loss of originals, the absence of reliable copies, etc. From this point of view, ecdotics can be considered the archeology of the text.

A brief history of ecdotics

The first philologists concerned with the integrity and fidelity in the edition of the works were the Alexandrian philologists who edited the works of Homer. In the Middle Ages, the Roman philologist and father of the Church Saint Jerome took care to know Hebrew and Greek well in order to establish a reliable canon of sacred texts for Christianity, the Bible known as the Vulgate. Subsequently, the Humanism of the Renaissance applied itself to carry out the same task more broadly for classical Greco-Roman literature, which for the first time was attempted to be restored in a comprehensive and, so to speak, programmed manner. In the 19th century Karl Lachmann made the first stable attempts to scientifically overcome the impressionist error correction procedure (emendatio ope ingenii) of the humanists. Gaston Paris also made contributions in this regard. On the other hand, Henri Quentin devised the reconstructive method, and Joseph Bédier found some flaws in Lachmann's method when editing the Lai de l'ombre: he did not anticipate the contaminations " horizontal" between several texts simultaneously. Neolachmannism, however, re-emerged with force as a lesser evil (Sebastiano Timpanaro, Cesare Segre). But the electronic or digital age has not only contributed a great cataloging tending to an enormous unification by countries and increased in extreme the possibilities of search, location and quantification of materials but also, through the new fields already established of the so-called Informatics for Humanities, or Humanistic Informatics or Digital Humanities and the concepts and uses of digital publishing, its concept of hypertext and the consequent new possibilities that it brings, have considerably amplified the panorama and range of existing media.

Problems and dangers of ecdotics

A common defect of the printed editions is, on the one hand, the abundance of misprints or errors, the accumulation of which leads to distort the text, and on the other hand, the lack of critical sense when choosing the best text to carry out. one edit. The text of an edition, then, must be chosen for its fidelity to the author's original, if not the original itself. The set of texts transmitted by a certain work is called tradition in textual criticism. Among these codices, the best text must be chosen, and the most faithful text cannot always be found in a particular one of the books or manuscripts that transmit a work: sometimes it is necessary to reconstruct a lost text that is preserved fragmentary, deformed, or irregularly among several scattered testimonies and many times the texts that preserve a work in the tradition differ in a certain passage, which is altered or corrupted. This requires a great critical effort to present a homogeneous and faithful text and a very fine scientific judgment to find a lectio facilior (reading closer to the author's original passage) instead of a lectio dificilior (misreading and away from the original text). For example, in the editions of Garcilaso de la Vega this verse "y de las verdes hojas" appeared in the 1543 publication together with the work of Juan Boscán; but in one manuscript it appears "y of the green eggs". If both in one text and in the other the reading is correct and forges meaning, which one is correct? During the Renaissance it was thought that the most ingenious (emendatio ope ingenii) was the correct one, until in the century XIX the philologist Karl Lachmann (1793-1851) began to use more scientific criteria to avoid the errors caused by dangerous intuition.

An ancient text may have been spread through three different traditions depending on the transmission procedure: handwritten, printed, and oral. Each one generates a different type of copy errors. To these traditions one more can be added in modern times, electronic transmission, which generates a typology of mechanized errors that is also different. In the case of the manuscript, this can be autograph (of the author) or apograph (copy of another). When we keep a manuscript, we know that it is original if it is autograph. As of the XVIII century in most of the countries copyrights begin to be regulated, for which reason publishes nothing without authorization from the author and is important in the case of print: the printed text is sometimes superior to the manuscript because the manuscript has been corrected or the edition is revised by the author, or the edition is based on a good manuscript not acquaintance. Currently the editions are reviewed by the author: proofreading. For example, in La Regenta it reads "un gabinete viejo" and 70 years after the death of Clarín it is shown that the true expression was "a red cabinet" looking at the author's original manuscripts. On the other hand, in the transmission the texts may have suffered another type of damage related to culture: censorship, adaptation, summary, lengthening... Time of silence, by Luis Martín Santos, for example, today has twenty pages more than in 1969, when it was published with censored pages in Franco's times.

Codicology teaches how to describe and study manuscript codices. Textual criticism, how to detect copying errors, amend them and edit a text with fidelity to the lost original or archetype. For this, a tree of written testimonies of a work called stemma or stema is reconstructed, which serves to guide the editor through the tradition that a text has transmitted. Copying errors, as established by Karl Lachmann, creator of the Lachmanian method of text editing that bears his name, serve to separate the branches of that tree, establishing different transmission routes. In this way, families of texts are established by an original text from which a group of works descends.

Eclecticism

Eclecticism refers to the practice of consulting a wide variety of testimonials for a particular original. The practice is based on the principle that stories that are more independent of transmission are less likely to carry the same mistakes. What one omits, the other could keep; what one adds, in the other probably does not add it. Eclecticism allows inferences to be drawn toward the original text, based on contrasting evidence between testimonies.