Textual scholarship in the context of Document

Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts (mss) or of printed books. Such texts may range in dates from the earliest writing in cuneiform, impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of a 21st-century author's work. Historically, scribes who were paid to copy documents may have been literate, but many were simply copyists, mimicking the shapes of letters without necessarily understanding what they meant. This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand. Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example, the censoring of printed work for political, religious or cultural reasons. Additionally, interpolation, the insertion of new material into an existing text, can occur when scribes or editors added explanatory notes, corrections, or supplementary content that later became incorporated into the main text.

The objective of the textual critic's work is to provide a better understanding of the creation and historical transmission of the text and its variants. This understanding may lead to the production of a critical edition containing a scholarly curated text. If a scholar has several versions of a manuscript but no known original, then established methods of textual criticism can be used to seek to reconstruct the original text as closely as possible. The same methods can be used to reconstruct intermediate versions, or recensions, of a document's transcription history, depending on the number and quality of the text available.

In textual and classical scholarship, the editio princeps (Latin for first edition; plural: editiones principes) of a work is the first printed edition of a work that previously had existed only in manuscripts (which had to be copied by hand in order to circulate).

For example, the editio princeps of Homer is that of Demetrius Chalcondyles, now thought to be from 1488. The most important texts of classical Greek and Roman authors were for the most part produced in editiones principes in the years from 1465 to 1525, following the invention of the printing press around 1440.

Romance studies or Romance philology (Aragonese: filolochía romanica; Catalan: filologia romànica; French: romanistique; Italian: filologia romanza; Portuguese: filologia romance; Romanian: romanistică; Spanish: filología románica) is an academic discipline that covers the study of the languages, literatures, and cultures of areas that speak Romance languages. Romance studies departments usually include the study of Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese. Additional areas of study include Romanian and Catalan, on one hand, and culture, history, and politics on the other hand.

Becoming proficient in Romance studies requires extensive specialized training focused on a thorough exploration of the histories of languages and literatures. This education includes detailed study in textual scholarship, paleography, and classical languages, which are core aspects of philological disciplines.

Liding, sometimes referred to as lixie, is the practice of rewriting ancient Chinese character forms in clerical or regular script. Liding is often used in Chinese textual studies.

Harrison Mosher Hayford (b. Belfast, Maine 1 November 1916 - d. 10 December 2001 Evanston, Illinois) was a scholar of American literature, most prominently of Herman Melville, a book-collector, and a textual editor. He taught at Northwestern University from 1942 until his retirement in 1986. He was a leading figure in the post-World War II generation of Melville scholars who mounted the Melville Revival. He was General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry The Writings of Herman Melville published by Northwestern University Press, which established reliable texts for all of Melville's works by using techniques of textual criticism.

G. Thomas Tanselle surveyed the scholarship about Herman Melville over the twentieth century and concluded that "Harrison Hayford has been responsible for more basic work —from the maintenance of a file of secondary material to the production of critical editions—than anyone else” .