After my last post on critical and diplomatic editions, a colleague wrote me inviting me to consider the case of half-baked editions. How should we call them?

Let me start by trying to achieve some clarity. John Taber, in his exemplary book on the chapter on perception of the Ślokavārttika speaks of a “semi-critical edition”, insofar as he did not look at new manuscripts, but improved the text of the editions by collating and comparing them among each other, with the commentaries and with the sources. The result is an appendix with suggested readings for the ŚV text. It is hard to call it a “critical” edition (because it lacks a manuscript basis) and the label “semi-critical” is also possibly misleading, since it seems to suggest that the text has the same basis of the one of a critical edition, but that the critical choices have not been completed. By hearing “semi-critical”, I would, accordingly, rather expect something between a collation and a critical edition, not a text based on existing editions and further improved as described before. Therefore, I would call these cases just “improved edition“, but “revised edition” would also work. Still, in cases such as the Ślokavārttika, one can reasonably attempt the reconstruction of a specific text as based on either Kumārila’s original intention (as reconstructed through his other works, his interactions with other thinkers and his commentators) or on the text as read by a given commentator.

The colleague also invited me to consider the case of texts for which a critical edition could be said to be impossible, such as Purāṇas. Now, let me repeat that an edition might have different purposes, and that the key is to be aware of what one wants to achieve. Aiming at the Urtext of a hymn transmitted orally in different regions and perhaps even languages might be out of place, but one might reasonably aim at reconstructing the text of the same hymn as it was read and transmitted in manuscripts in, say, 16th c. Karṇaṭaka, or as commented upon by a given scholar in 13th c. Gujarat. Alternatively, one might try to reconstruct the history of the transmission. Charles Li and others have been developing softwares which allow one to put one or the other manuscript collated as the main text and the others as alternative readings and to change the main text with just one click. In this way, it would be relatively easy to compare the version of the text transmitted in one or the other group of manuscripts.

In other words, let us not mix the intense work needed to prepare a critical editions with only low level textual criticism or with the myth of the reconstruction of an Urtext. This is just one possible approach to the redaction of a critical editions and can only be appropriate in specific cases (authorial texts for which a historical author can be individuated and manuscript material can be proven to depend from a single source etc.).

How would you call “improved editions”?