2. While it may be necessary to collate printed editions, it may not be required to report their readings in a critical edition, if the editor is confident that the only significant readings are conjectures. The critical editor may eliminate previous editions: if the editor is reasonabally confident that a given editor used manuscripts represented in his or her edition, it should be acceptable to report only the readings in the previous editions that appear to be conjectural. Printed editions whose only contribution is the odd contribution clutter a critical edition's apparatus and make it more difficult for the reader to evaluate the editor's choices.

On 23 Mar 2012, at 5:05 PM, Michael Slouber wrote:

Another point in favor of including the readings of printed editions is that they often contain conjectures and emendations that might be valuable for reconstituting the text. It is an open secret that scribes are not, in fact, imperfect copy-machines, but often seek to improve real or perceived deficiencies in a text. To privilege the reading of an editor writing by hand from a hundred years ago to one writing today with a computer is based on fallacious understanding of textual criticism. Each reading must surely be evaluated on its own merits and based on all of the available evidence that backs it up.

Best,

Michael Slouber
Ph.D. Candidate
South and Southeast Asian Studies
UC Berkeley
http://garudam.info

On Mar 23, 2012, at 4:57 PM, Patrick Olivelle wrote:

Given that I did include the readings of several commonly used printed editions of Manu for my critical edition, here is my explanation. There could be pragmatic and substantial reasons for using them. Pragmatically -- and this was my principal reason -- I thought it good for people who have been using these editions in the past to see how their readings compared with both the critically constituted text and the readings of various manuscript traditions. It was illuminating to see that most followed the Kullūka manuscripts; actually one can make a stemma of these printed editions that tend to follow each other!!

Substantially, sometimes one is unable to obtain the manuscripts used by a previous editor. There were some used by Jolly that I was unable to use, and thus I used the variants from these provided by Jolly. The same happened in my edition of the Viṣṇu Smṛti -- the Adyar Library edition had used some manuscripts that I was unable to obtain.

But there indeed may be other reasons as well.

Patrick

On Mar 23, 2012, at 3:46 PM, Allen Thrasher wrote:

This raises a question, which I think I raised on the list some years ago, but which might be worth raising again. What is the value of printed (commercial) editions of old works as testimonia? Should they be included in the sources collated for critical editions?

Not quite on the same subject, but perhaps related, is something Jim Nye of Chicago told me some years ago. He discovered that Ananadashrama Press eds. of the same title frequently represent different readings, that instead of resetting the text from a copy of an earlier ed. they published, they would sometimes start over from scratch. Consequently he was trying to get copies of all the Press's editions for the Regenstein, not only all its titles.

Allen