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Introduction

Alf Hiltebeitel

in Dharma: Its Early History in Law, Religion, and Narrative

This chapter introduces the book's usage of “dharma texts,”, and proposes a chronology of the eleven discussed. It then takes up the three main texts used, the two Sanskrit epics and Manu, offering ... More

This chapter introduces the book's usage of “dharma texts,”, and proposes a chronology of the eleven discussed. It then takes up the three main texts used, the two Sanskrit epics and Manu, offering arguments in their favor of their Critical Editions. After discussing B. M. Matilial's notion of a paradigm shift around Kṛṣṇa as offering a way of thinking about the Mahābhārata in particular as introducing change over time with regard to dharma in the handling of moral dilemmas, it concludes by outlining the book in relation to this theme.Less

The Nārāyaṇīya and the Early Reading Communities of the Mahābhārata

Alf Hiltebeitel

in Between the Empires: Society in India 300 BCE to 400 CE

This chapter discusses a unit of the twelfth book of the Mahābhārata, the Nārāyaṇīya, for its bearing on the textual and religious history of post-Vedic and classical India. Although no portion of ... More

This chapter discusses a unit of the twelfth book of the Mahābhārata, the Nārāyaṇīya, for its bearing on the textual and religious history of post-Vedic and classical India. Although no portion of the Mahābhārata has been considered so axiomatically “Gupta” as the Nārāyaṇīya, the evidence for such dating-furthered most recently in the collaborative volume Nārāyaṇīya Studien and in subsequent essays by two of its authors is far from convincing. Likewise, it has been argued in that volume and by others before it that no unit of the Mahābhārata is so at odds with the rest of the text. It has become the axiomatic interpolation, and would have to be considered the ultimate test for any argument that the archetype recovered by the Poona Critical Edition, in which the Nārāyaṇīya is included, could provide access to the work as it was originally conceived.Less

The Digital Fate of the Critical Apparatus

Daniel Apollon and Claire Bélisle

in Digital Critical Editions

This chapter discusses the different characteristics of critical edition. It illustrates a global view of the processes and key components of digital critical edition with examples of problems and ... More

This chapter discusses the different characteristics of critical edition. It illustrates a global view of the processes and key components of digital critical edition with examples of problems and concrete solutions. The chapter aims to describe how “traditional” components of critical edition—the critical apparatus, the page layout, indexes, and different types of reference systems—can be combined, through digital technology, with tools for analysis and dynamic organization under the reader's control. Through examples of online productions, the chapter shows how the historical modes and conventions are reformulated in a digital environment and how digitally specific modalities can renew critical edition projects.Less

Introduction: As Texts Become Digital

Daniel Apollon, Claire Bélisle, and Philippe Régnier

in Digital Critical Editions

This introductory chapter argues that the future of the traditional forms of culture, knowledge, and scholarship appears to be at risk, as the world becomes digital and new generations consider ... More

This introductory chapter argues that the future of the traditional forms of culture, knowledge, and scholarship appears to be at risk, as the world becomes digital and new generations consider computers, mobile appliances, and the Internet as extensions of their body that are essential for living. The book provides a survey of critical editing confronted with the digital world that is organized in three parts. The first one discusses the historical context and the main challenges that researchers, teachers, and the public readers meet with the integration of digital tools and medium in the activity of critical edition. The second one details how critical edition deals with the technical constraints it faces in order to explore new presentation modalities of heritage texts. The last one looks at critical edition practice through examining cases that range from data capture and layout to the institutional and organizational conditions for production.Less

Ongoing Challenges for Digital Critical Editions

Philippe Régnier

in Digital Critical Editions

This chapter focuses on the issues at stake in digital scholarly edition, commenting on the main challenges and opportunities that the use of digital technology, computers, and dynamic schemas in ... More

This chapter focuses on the issues at stake in digital scholarly edition, commenting on the main challenges and opportunities that the use of digital technology, computers, and dynamic schemas in online publication of critical editions entails. It emphasizes how the new digital environment can modify and perhaps extend textual criticism's scope and reach. Particular attention is given to societal, epistemological, and cultural factors that can influence the evolution of the discipline; to the rapid change and transformation rhythm; to the inherent instability of new digital environments; and finally, to the multiplicity of the varied representational frameworks that can compete within a digital structure.Less

Processing

Andrew Piper

in Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age

The early-nineteenth-century editors played an integral role in producing the creative heritage upon which the imagined communities of emerging European nation states were to be based. For editors ... More

The early-nineteenth-century editors played an integral role in producing the creative heritage upon which the imagined communities of emerging European nation states were to be based. For editors such as Lachmann and the Grimms manuscripts were seen not as perfect records of an original work but instead as corrupted variants or incomplete fragments of a lost origin. Scott's concern with the reliability of confessional speech would continue through the conclusion of the Tales of My Landlord in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) that appeared along with A Legend of Montrose in the third series of the Tales. Like the critical edition and its increasingly pronounced capacity to construct the originality of its authors, Scott's fictions too increasingly motivated the principle of the proprietary as the heart of writing by pointing to the art of mediation as the necessary precondition of origination.Less

The Romance of the Critical Edition

in Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera

Critical editions of nineteenth-century Italian operas make available the best texts that modern scholarship, musicianship, and editorial technique can produce. A critical edition of Rigoletto is ... More

Critical editions of nineteenth-century Italian operas make available the best texts that modern scholarship, musicianship, and editorial technique can produce. A critical edition of Rigoletto is necessarily an interpretation of Verdi's Rigoletto. The difference is that a critical edition makes its substantive interventions graphically explicit and explains them in ample critical notes. Users of the score can ascertain where “Verdi's Rigoletto” ends and editorial intervention begins. A critical edition also differs from other editions in its insistence that the criteria for editorial interventions are clear and that such interventions are restricted to those that derive from Verdi's explicit indications or meet the levels of consistency and logic that reflect Verdi's notational practice. The critical editions continue to recognize the composer as the central figure in the Italian operatic landscape and seek, where possible, to reproduce his or her voice as fully and accurately as possible.Less

What Digital Remediation Does to Critical Editions and Reading Practices

Terje Hillesund and Claire Bélisle

in Digital Critical Editions

This chapter analyzes critical edition digitization ambitions, ranging from the conception and aims of editors to the expectations of readers. The first part deals with issues and questions raised by ... More

This chapter analyzes critical edition digitization ambitions, ranging from the conception and aims of editors to the expectations of readers. The first part deals with issues and questions raised by the digital trend in scholarly text editions as they migrate from one media to another. The chapter explains, through the concept of remediation, how the traits and configuration of editions that are present in print technology live on in digital technology, even though text creation and dissemination have profoundly changed. Digital remediation of text is taking place within a digital context impelling new reading habits. The remainder of the chapter explores these new emerging reading practices, coupled with a probing of readers' expectations.Less

Toward a New Political Economy of Critical Editions

Philippe Régnier

in Digital Critical Editions

This chapter analyzes the political economy of digital critical editions and the development of research networks, as well as the ecological environment and the concrete human resources in digital ... More

This chapter analyzes the political economy of digital critical editions and the development of research networks, as well as the ecological environment and the concrete human resources in digital critical edition. The first part builds on the scope of scholarly editing's “political economy in a pre-digital era,” and describes the human resources context that has followed the migration of critical edition to the digital world. Meanwhile, the second part discusses the impacts of collaborative work, human networks, open software ideology, and resource sharing on the new political economy of digital scholarly edition. Particular attention is given to the role of institutions such as publishers, research organizations and universities, and scientific networks in this new production environment.Less

From Books to Collections: Critical Editions of Heterogeneous Documents

Sarah Mombert

in Digital Critical Editions

This chapter explores the critical edition of hybrid materials: heterogeneous documents, facsimiles, pictures, sounds, and videos. Through concise examples, it illustrates how and why different ... More

This chapter explores the critical edition of hybrid materials: heterogeneous documents, facsimiles, pictures, sounds, and videos. Through concise examples, it illustrates how and why different collections, although “critical,” do not attain the usual ambitions of critical editions (Greek authors, the Bible, canonical authors) but address another conception of “critical” and “edition.” The chapter examines the implications of critical projects when reconstructions of the given texts' original states are of lesser or peripheral interest. The term “critical” is used mainly to connote the construction of a context amplified through comments, intersecting links, and thematic indexation.Less

Scholars and Performers: The Case of Semiramide

in Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera

Until the Metropolitan Opera's 1990 production, the copies of the 1962 La Scala score and materials derived from it served as the basis for modern revivals of Semiramide. However, during those years, ... More

Until the Metropolitan Opera's 1990 production, the copies of the 1962 La Scala score and materials derived from it served as the basis for modern revivals of Semiramide. However, during those years, theaters employing this material complained bitterly about its condition. Alberto Zedda made an effort to improve the situation by correcting the score and materials, but there were too many difficulties associated with the original product. Therefore, Philip Gossett agreed to prepare the critical edition of Semiramide, so that it could be used, for the first time, as the basis for the performances at the Metropolitan Opera. There are four principal ways in which the new critical edition differs from the older score: completeness, use of autograph material unknown to previous editors, reconstruction of the stage band Rossini employed in 1823, and rendering Rossini's opera more accurately and providing a more idiomatic treatment of articulation and dynamics.Less

The Digital Turn in Textual Scholarship: Historical and Typological Perspectives

Odd Einar Haugen and Daniel Apollon

in Digital Critical Editions

This chapter presents a historical overview of critical editions since the nineteenth century from three angles: a historic perspective, a contextualizing perspective, and an intrinsic perspective. ... More

This chapter presents a historical overview of critical editions since the nineteenth century from three angles: a historic perspective, a contextualizing perspective, and an intrinsic perspective. The historical perspective is based on the development of Karl Lachmann and Gaston Paris, who have introduced a rigorous form coupled with a logical approach that is still present in “philological science,” and includes the first tryouts in using computers to improve, extend, and diffuse scholarly editions. Additionally, an overview of the evolution and the diffusion of the different paradigms and practices is developed by the authors. The chapter also addresses questions of content and authority.Less

Digital Critical Editing: Separating Encoding from Presentation

Alois Pichler and Tone Merete Bruvik

in Digital Critical Editions

This chapter focuses on the aims of digital critical edition, and offers an organized inventory of tools that can help with collation, edition, research, reading, and conservation. It presents an ... More

This chapter focuses on the aims of digital critical edition, and offers an organized inventory of tools that can help with collation, edition, research, reading, and conservation. It presents an overview of the tasks that express the ambitions of digital critical edition, while unveiling a classified inventory of techniques used at different levels of data collection, transcription, edition, research, consultation, and archiving. The discussion of these techniques thus provides readers with a natural progression from collection to edition and from edition to use and to conservation. Particular attention is given to tools and techniques that enrich traditional critical editions and facilitate scientific decision making, as well as facilitate, stimulate, and amplify readers' traditional and new access to edited materials.Less

‘Without a Harmonising Medium’: Eliot in 1919, and Contemporary Criticism of Early Modern Drama

Steven Matthews

in T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature

Chapter One establishes one important ground for this study, since it reviews Eliot's early understanding of the Early Modern period by outlining the books upon it which he owned, and to which he ... More

Chapter One establishes one important ground for this study, since it reviews Eliot's early understanding of the Early Modern period by outlining the books upon it which he owned, and to which he constantly referred. Further, it outlines the contemporary publishing situation around Early Modern literature. It then goes on to consider the critical context for the determining genre for him, even at this period, drama, a genre that was itself considered central to contemporary reconsiderations of the earlier period. Issues of national unity, relations between author and audience, but more particularly those relating to formal coherence are implicated, and considered here through their impact on Eliot's ideas and generic choices.Less

Theodor Mommsen, Louis Duchesne, and the Liber pontificalis: Classical Philology and Medieval Latin Texts

Carmela Vircillo Franklin

in Marginality, Canonicity, Passion

This chapter juxtaposes the theory and the practice of philology in the late nineteenth-century race to produce a modern critical edition of the Liber pontificalis. The resulting works, one by the ... More

This chapter juxtaposes the theory and the practice of philology in the late nineteenth-century race to produce a modern critical edition of the Liber pontificalis. The resulting works, one by the French priest and church historian Louis Duchesne, the other by the classicist and German patriot Theodor Mommsen, showcase the editors’ divergent aims in the application of recensionist criticism, shaped as it was by their scholarly, national, religious, and personal loyalties. Mommsen’s edition adheres to the principles of ‘German’ critical philology and its desire to recover the original text; Duchesne’s two volumes exploit the nature of the medieval papal chronicle as a constantly changing ‘living text’ in order to emphasize the historical significance of its reception. Both editions illustrate the themes of marginality and canonicity as they relate to literary genre and historical period, to religious commitment and national sentiment, and to the tension between classical methodology and medieval texts.Less

Text, Author, and Authority: The Nabīvaṃśa and the Making of Islamic Community

Ayesha A. Irani

in The Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam

This chapter studies the NV as a pāñcāli on the Prophet in its Bengali oral-literate and performance contexts, and in relation to the wider world of Islamic literature. It examines the manner in ... More

This chapter studies the NV as a pāñcāli on the Prophet in its Bengali oral-literate and performance contexts, and in relation to the wider world of Islamic literature. It examines the manner in which the author harnesses orality and literacy in the service of his text, discusses the structure of the NV, and analyzes the relationship of the critical edition to the manuscript tradition. This chapter also studies the role of the author in forging Islamic identity and community.Less

Markup Technology and Textual Scholarship

Claus Huitfeldt

in Digital Critical Editions

This chapter describes how digital critical edition supposes a mastery of markup systems, providing an overview in the form of an inventory of standards, and of markup, presentation, and archiving ... More

This chapter describes how digital critical edition supposes a mastery of markup systems, providing an overview in the form of an inventory of standards, and of markup, presentation, and archiving techniques. It discusses the state of the art while focusing on key architectures and techniques considered as the basis of digital critical edition. The chapter introduces some aspects of markup technology that are particularly relevant to textual scholarship, such as the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and considers some of their limitations, possibilities, and future potential. Since there is no need to be conversant with all aspects and details of the markup technology, most of what is covered here is of a general nature, albeit focusing on issues assumed to be of particular relevance for textual scholarship.Less