Authoritative Text: A text or version of a work that has some claim to authority or authenticity.
An authoritative text is a representation or version of a work -- a manuscript, typescript, printed edition, etc. --which has some claim to authority, usually because it has been authorized by the original author or because it draws from or is based on 'authorized' texts which have now been lost.
Collation: The technique of comparing different versions of a particular text in some systematic fashion.
Copy-Text: The text used by an editor as the basis for his or her edition.
Usually the copy-text has been identified in some way as the best, least-corrupt, etc., and the editor will tend to follow its readings unless (s)he encounters an obvious error or disagrees strongly with a particular aspect of the text. Some editions will rely on their copy-text more than others, depending on the work, the state of the copy-text and the editor's own judgment.
Emendation: Corrections proposed by the editor based on his/her own judgment rather than a textual source.
Emendation decisions are often made with the assumption that the manuscripts containing the alternate reading (often ALL of the surviving manuscripts) have all copied and passed on what was an error of some kind in some earlier copy of the text.
Historical Collation: A record of all the variants found in significant or authoritative editions of a text.
Historical collation attempts to represent all of the variants present in authoritative editions of a particular text. It is now considered a key feature of serious scholarly editions, and allows the reader to see the variants an editor had to work with/choose from. This information is often presented in a critical apparatus.
Inferential Manuscript: The unknown, earlier/ancestor version of a manuscript which recension attempts to reconstruct.
An "inferential manuscripts" is so called because its existence is inferred, but not proven. Inferential is the preferred term, since hypothetical could also refer to a range of other manuscripts including intermediate or even original texts.
Reading: The way that a particular part of a text (a word, line, etc.) appears in a particular version of that text.
Recension: Backtracking to determine the latest common 'ancestor' of a group of manuscripts.
Recension is an attempt to find the most-recent, single, common text from which all of the existing manuscripts of a text evolved. Often this technique is more theoretical than practical, since it can be impossible to rediscover the original text based only on later manuscripts.
Scribal Error: An error caused when a text is copied incorrectly.
Note that there are many different kinds of scribal errors. The most common varieties include errors of omission; errors of addition; errors of transposition; and errors of alteration.
Transmission: The passing-down and preservation of a text over time.
Transmission refers to the process of preservation of a particular text over time. This is generally accomplished by the original text being copied and recopied over a long period of time. Since copies were generally made manually, mistakes and changes tended to appear. Scholarly editors can sometimes trace the development of these changes backwards to get some sense of the original text (recension).
Variant: A word, line or other portion of a text which appears differently in some sources than in others.
A variant is a word, line, or other part of a text (depending on the text, this may include punctuation) which appears differently in some manuscripts/sources than in others. 'Variants' reflect errors or disagreements at some point earlier in the history of the text, which were then passed down through different manuscript copies. When compiling a critical edition, an editor compares 'variants' between sources as part of the process of identifying (or reconstructing) the 'best' or most authoritative version of the text.
Witness: Another term for a source of a particular text or part of the text.
A witness is a source for a particular text or part of a text, which an editor can use to reconstruct that text. Witnesses may be direct (i.e., a manuscript or edition of the text in question), or indirect (i.e., a passage from the text which survives as a quotation in another work, such as a commentary or letter).
