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Not only literary students, but also well-known scholars share the idea that the reconstruction of a text is a routine job which leaves little room for creativity. After some 40 years during which I have edited or prepared the edition of works of Machiavelli ( Discorso intorno alla nostra lingua), Pietro Aretino ( Cortegiana) and Torquato Tasso ( Aminta), and 17 years devoted to the textual transmission and the text of Dante’s Commedia, I think that, except for the first phases of the job, textual editing requires almost constant critical thought and interpretation. I shall present a little series of examples, mostly from Dante’s Commedia, with cases ranging from decisions in the realm of accidentals to rather complicated choices among competing substantial readings and to the risky enterprise of emendation against all the witnesses of the work. While these examples can give an idea of the novelty of some solutions of my forthcoming edition (the introduction and Inferno will appear in the summer of 2021), in my view, they seem to confirm the opinion of the great classical philologist Giorgio Pasquali, for whom textual criticism isn’t mechanical; it is methodical.

Stemmatology studies aspects of textual criticism that use genealogical methods to analyse a set of copies of a text whose autograph has been lost. This handbook is the first to cover the entire field, encompassing both theoretical and practical aspects of traditional as well as modern digital methods and their history. As an art ( ars), stemmatology’s main goal is editing and thus presenting to the reader a historical text in the most satisfactory way. As a more abstract discipline ( scientia), it is interested in the general principles of how texts change in the process of being copied. Thirty eight experts from all of the fields involved have joined forces to write this handbook, whose eight chapters cover material aspects of text traditions, the genesis and methods of traditional "Lachmannian" textual criticism and the objections raised against it, as well as modern digital methods used in the field. The two concluding chapters take a closer look at how this approach towards texts and textual criticism has developed in some disciplines of textual scholarship and compare methods used in other fields that deal with "descent with modification". The handbook thus serves as an introduction to this interdisciplinary field. – First systematic coverage of stemmatology as a field within textual criticism. – Written by 38 experts in fields from various philologies to biology and information theory. – Illustrations and many practical examples from a wide range of disciplines are provided to render the content more accessible.

This paper is concerned with an aspects of Bédier’s legacy, possibly the least known in the English-speaking world. Bédier›s works of 1913 and 1928–29 did not just create a schism in the apparently peaceful context of textual scholarship: through his statements, critical editions produced with a single copy-text regained the academic prestige that Gaston Paris› adaptations of stemmatic method had taken away from them. Since then, Bédier›s objections have also forced meticulous textual critics to rethink their editorial practice: though retaining the method of shared errors, such scholars (often scarcely known outside Italy) have brought important progress in the methods of textual criticism.