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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

of this view is evident to anyone who has read in the editorial literature concerning both ancient and modern texts, for the same issues keep turning up, and some writers seem to be rediscovering, with effort, what was thoroughly discussed in a different field years before. By not familiarizing themselves with the textual criticism of classical, biblical, and medieval literature, textual scholars of more recent literature are cutting themselves off from a voluminous body of theoretical discussion and the product of many generations of experience. And by not keeping up with developments in the editing of post-medieval writings, students of earlier works are depriving themselves of the knowledge of significant advances in editorial thinking. Whereas in the classical and biblical fields textual scholarship was at the forefront, both in prestige and in achievement, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the leadership in theoretical debate about textual matters has in more recent years passed to the field of Renaissance and later literature in English. If textual scholars of these later writings have never quite been accorded by their colleagues the same position of centrality that editors of the classics had long held in their field,[1] there can be no doubt that the extensive, and sometimes acrimonious, debate provoked by Greg's famous essay on copy-text,[2] and its extension by Fredson Bowers and then by the Center for Editions of American Authors,[3] have caused textual and editorial questions to be of serious concern to a larger portion of the scholars in the field than they had ever been before. Although the phrase "modern editing" in my title of course refers elliptically to the editing of modern literature, there is some justice in taking it at the same time to mean, more literally, the latest developments in editing.

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.