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Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of transcription errors in texts, both manuscripts and printed books. Ancient scribes made alterations when copying manuscripts by hand.〔Ehrman 2005, p. 46〕 Given a manuscript copy, several or many copies, but not the original document, the textual critic might seek to reconstruct the original text (the archetype or autograph) as closely as possible. The same processes can be used to attempt to reconstruct intermediate versions, or recensions, of a document's transcription history.〔Vincent. ''A History of the Textual Criticism of the New Testament'' "... that process which it sought to determine the original text of a document or a collection of documents, and to exhibit, freed from all the errors, corruptions, and variations which may have been accumulated in the course of its transcription by successive copying."〕 The ultimate objective of the textual critic's work is the production of a "critical edition" containing a text most closely approximating the original. There are three fundamental approaches to textual criticism: eclecticism, stemmatics, and copy-text editing. Techniques from the biological discipline of cladistics are currently also being used to determine the relationships between manuscripts. The phrase "lower criticism" is used to describe the contrast between textual criticism and "higher criticism", which is the endeavor to establish the authorship, date, and place of composition of the original text. == History == Textual criticism has been practiced for over two thousand years. Early textual criticsWho? were concerned with preserving the works of antiquity, and this continued through the medieval period into early modern times until the invention of the printing press. Many ancient works, such as the Bible and the Greek tragedies, survive in hundreds of copies, and the relationship of each copy to the original may be unclear. Textual scholars have debated for centuries which sources are most closely derived from the original, hence which readings in those sources are correct. Although biblical books that are letters, like Greek plays, presumably had one original, the question of whether some biblical books, like the gospels, ever had just one original has been discussed.〔Tanselle, (1989) ''A Rationale of Textual Criticism''〕 Interest in applying textual criticism to the Qur'an has also developed after the discovery of the Sana'a manuscripts in 1972, which possibly date back to the 7–8th centuries. In the English language, the works of Shakespeare have been a particularly fertile ground for textual criticism—both because the texts, as transmitted, contain a considerable amount of variation, and because the effort and expense of producing superior editions of his works have always been widely viewed as worthwhile.〔Jarvis 1995, pp. 1–17〕 The principles of textual criticism, although originally developed and refined for works of antiquity, the Bible, and Shakespeare,〔Montgomery 1997〕 have been applied to many works, extending backwards from the present to the earliest known written documents, in Mesopotamia and Egypt—a period of about five millennia. However, the application of textual criticism to non-religious works does not antedate the invention of printing. While Christianity has been relatively receptive to textual criticism, application of it to the Jewish (Masoretic) Torah and the Qur'an is, to the devout, taboo. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Textual criticism」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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