Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
1.
The
meaning
humanism
of
legal
Journal
3. Printed sources
philological method
and
16
the
interchangeable.
Although
its
practitioners
would
doubtless
hesitate to formulate the principle
quite so nakedly, it is perhaps best
captured in the nuances of the
English expression "any old edition
will do". Thus contemporary works
of
legal-historical
scholarship
generally
exhibit
in
their
"bibliographies" the list of early
editions consulted, a list which
inevitably reveals the entirely
random concatenation of editions
which happened to stand on the
shelves of the library most
conveniently at the disposition of
the individual scholar. Underlying
such works lies the unspoken
assumption, as erroneous as it is
universal, that all editions of printed
books are "more or less the same".
The
difference
between
the
manuscript and the printed book, so
the argument runs, is that whereas
every manuscript is different, every
edition is the same. The invention of
printing
assured
the
mass
production of identical texts, while
each successive edition simply
reproduced
the
text
of
its
predecessor.
In reality, however, the invention of
printing had precisely the opposite
effect. The economics of early
printing, when labour was cheap
and paper enormously expensive,
when conditions of storage were
primitive and neither insurance nor
copyright sufficiently developed to
protect a publishing enterprise,
compelled the early publisher to
Technology.
Journal
14