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Most scholarly editors, regardless of the nature or date of the material they work with, recognize that they are participating in a tradition extending back to antiquity; they realize that the activity of "textual criticism," whether called by that name or not, was for centuries concerned with the establishment of the texts of ancient Greek and Roman writings and of the Old and New Testaments and that the development of their discipline is therefore tied to the history of those works. Even if they are not familiar with the details of that history, they know that Aristarchus and other librarians at Alexandria in the third and second centuries B.C. attempted to determine what was authentic and what was spurious in the texts of the manuscripts they assembled; that the Renaissance humanists (among them Poggio, Politian, Aldus, and Erasmus) were particularly concerned with locating, establishing, and disseminating texts in the ancient languages; that Richard Bentley in the early eighteenth century made contributions to the textual study of several Latin authors and proposed a text of the New Testament based on the earliest manuscripts; and that Karl Lachmann, a century later, provided the fullest exposition up to that time of the genealogical approach and is therefore sometimes regarded as the father of modern textual criticism. They probably also know that A.E. Housman had some sharp things to say about the editorial practices of many of his predecessors, comments that emerged from important methodological considerations.
But unless their own work involves classical or biblical or medieval texts, they have in all likelihood not followed closely the nineteenth-and twentieth-century history of textual study in these areas. The explanation is not simply the growing specialization of scholarship but the feeling that the textual criticism of manuscript texts produced centuries after their authors' deaths has little, if any, relevance to textual work on printed texts published during their authors' lifetimes. The foolishness
As a contribution toward what I hope will become increased communication among scholars in all these fields, I should like to offer in what follows a few reflections on the relations between textual work on early or medieval manuscripts and that on later printed texts. Although I do not propose a systematic survey of the history of classical, biblical, and medieval textual criticism,[4] I believe that some purpose is served by bringing together, in this context, references to a number of the significant discussions. What I trust will become clear in the process is that editors of ancient and modern materials have much more to learn from one another than they have generally recognized. Equally revealing, if rather depressing, is the fact that many of their areas of confusion are the same: some of the questions that have been endlessly and inconclusively debated—and often, it must be said, illogically argued as well —are identical in both fields. In either case, the essential point is the relevance each field has for the other.
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