Transmission and Textual Criticism
Mario De Nonno
Our knowledge of Latin literature and, more generally, any text a non-documentary nature written in after the First Punic War, depends as rule on an unbroken process conservation, transformation, and loss that developed from antiquity to modern age moved through subsequent phases aggregation disgregation, recovery dispersion. Prior invention printing press, texts destined for circulation were disseminated succession individual handwritten copies, which chronologically discontinuous or less faithful exemplar. Such circumstances textual transmission require text's surviving often contain widely differing readings, undergo comparative evaluation – judgement criticism goes by name ‘textual criticism’. A necessary outcome historical cultural conditions is great many works have reached us tradition originating single archetype.
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