The Critical Edition as Technology: a View from Biblical Studies

The critical edition, as the primary interface through which specialist textual critics shape the interpretations of historians and literary scholars, is an indispensable tool of philology and its successor disciplines. In this introductory essay to a special issue of Philological Encounters , we offer an approach to analyzing the role of the critical edition in the history and ongoing practice of scholarship on ancient texts, and explain the circumstances in the field of biblical studies from which this issue emerged. We argue that the niggling failures of critical editions can productively spark an infrastructural disposition in scholars who work with ancient texts—a renewed attentiveness to the labor, material affordances and constraints, technological capacities, and institutional structures oriented around the mediation of the past for the present. The Critical Edition in the Infrastructure of Philology illustrates the analytical value of such a disposition through a collection of compelling case studies.