HISTORY AND PRINCIPLES OF TEXTUAL CRITICISM

The module is aimed at providing students with the basic knowledge to approach the study of manuscript traditions. Furthermore students will be given an overview of the main editorial principles related to textual production in the Germanic-speaking and French-speaking world in the Middle Ages.

1. To know and understand the issues related to the transmission of literary texts in the medieval and modern Germanic-speaking and French-speaking territories; to know and understand both the philological procedures and the theorizations about how to produce a critical edition.
2. To be able to identify the issues related to the transmission of texts and the philological procedures apt to restore the text in the closest form as possible to the original; to acquire awareness of the linguistic, stylistic, historical and cultural, palaeographic and codicological knowledge that is required to produce a critical edition.
3. To be able to identify - by comparing manuscript witnesses, or print witnesses, with modern editions of the text - the procedure followed by editors as well as to judge, by way of the analysis of the critical discussion, the different degrees of appropriateness of the choices the editors made to restore the text.
4. To be able to talk in a clear and technically adequate way about the contents of the course, using a style that suits the communicative context.

There are no pre-requirements.

- The beginning of written transmission and the transmission of texts in the Germanic and French Middle Ages.
- Typology of editions.
- The critical edition: principles and process.
- Main actors in the European philological debate from the end of the 19th c. to the second half of the 20th c.
- Examples from various linguistic areas (Old and Middle English, Middle High German, Old French).

Chiesa, Paolo, Elementi di critica testuale. Bologna: Pàtron, 2012.
Further material will be provided during the lectures.

The oral examination will assess how the students have understood the course's contents according to the learning objectives declared in the Syllabus.

More specifically:
- Knowledge and understanding: checked through content questions;
- Applying knowledge and understanding: checked through a practical exercise, such as the description and assessment of an edition;
- Making judgements: checked through methodological questions;
- Communication skills: checked through assessment of how students answer questions using technical words and how they are able to construct a discourse;
- Learning skills: evaluation of the students' autonomy of judgement.

Lectures and practical exercises of transcription of digitised manuscripts.

Italian

oral