Variants and Variance in Classical Textual Cultures
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Edited by:
Glenn W. Most
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Funded by:
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin / UB
About this book
Given the limited durability of most textual supports, texts must be reproduced if they are to survive. And given the proliferation over time of users, practices, and places which need to have access to the texts that are important for cultural institutions, this is particularly true for authoritative texts. But the reproduction of texts by traditional means – either orally or by hand – inevitably produces variations. These variations can arise because of inattention, confusion, misunderstanding, deliberate modification, physical damage, and many other factors. In general, the more a text is reproduced, the more variations are likely to occur. But although the fact of textual variation in general is doubtless an anthropological universal, the specific forms it takes and the specific attitudes to its occurrence seem to vary widely from culture to culture. How variations develop in different cultures, on the basis of which forms of scholarly practices, collaborations, and institutional frameworks; what variants say about a culture’s understandings of text, authorship, and collective authorship; what happens when variants become creative and generate their own strands of tradition; to what degree changes in transmission media and processes of distribution, translations, or the migration of texts into different cultural or institutional contexts can influence or be influenced by the development of variants – these are the questions that this book addresses in a historical and culturally comparative perspective.
Author / Editor information
Glenn W. Most, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy.
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Preface
v -
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Contents
xvii -
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Errors or Innovation? Variants in Mesopotamian Literary, Cultic, and Pedagogical Texts from the Early Second Millennium BCE
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“Variant”, variation and pāṭha in Sanskrit
37 -
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Seeing Shadows in the Shade: The Narrative Quality of Textual Variants and the History of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia
85 -
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The Legacy of Diversity in Medieval East Asia: The Staying Power of Variants in Chinese-Language Buddhist Texts
109 -
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Textual Variants in Early China
151 -
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Frivolous Words on Bamboo and Silk: The Textual Criticism of Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127–200)
207 -
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Textual Variants in Homer: An Overview
231 -
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Philosophical Variants in Aristotle: The Text of Metaphysics Α and Plato’s Theories of Forms and Principles
257 -
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Interpolation in Latin Poetry
291 -
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The Textual Tradition of the Babylonian Talmud
311 -
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Miscarriage of Justice and Dissenting Re(d)actions in Kalīla and Dimna
337 -
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Taṣḥīf in the Arabic tradition: Variant Readings or Textual Corruption?
377 -
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The Textual Variant Unchained: Medieval Europe
391 -
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A Lax Attitude to the Word of God? Medieval Scholars and Variants in the Latin Bible
413 -
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Postscript: Variants of What? Variation on the Variant
437 -
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Index of Subjects
447 -
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Index of Persons
451 -
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Index of Works
455
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