Tradizione e prassi editoriale dei testi etiopici: un breve sguardo d’insieme

The tradition of Ethiopic texts, although characterized by a particular temporal articulation of its own that distinguishes texts from Antiquity and Late Antiquity and texts of the medieval age, has been and is the object of study of a philology that shares the history and paradigms of the other philologies of the Christian East; like these, throughout the course of the twentieth century and almost without exception, the criterion unwittingly selected and adopted as the norm of the ‘base manuscript’ dominated. Unlike the other philologies, however, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, the Italian school of Ethiopian studies renewed by Paolo Marrassini and eventually appreciated also in Europe and in Ethiopia, has largely applied the Neo-Lachmannian reconstructive stemmatic method to Ethiopic texts. Even in the absence of universal consensus, this method is still the only one that has prompted a theoretical-methodological reflection on the phenomenology of Ethiopic texts.