Criticism of the Variant: Philological Discussions in Traditional Commentary Cultures

All cultures in which written transmission of texts plays a role are confronted with the existence of variant readings. In manuscript cultures this may even be more pronounced; it is virtually axiomatic that one cannot expect to find two manuscripts of the same text which do not differ in some point in their readings. It is probably not by chance that with the emergence of a discipline called manuscript studies in recent years interest in the phenomenon is growing. At the same time concomitant large-scale digitisation projects, which make huge amounts of direct evidence available not only to scholars but also to a larger public, enable comparative studies in a way that not so long ago would have been unthinkable.