What is textual scholarship?

Texts form the basis for research into language and literature – this is a simple fact. Texts are often thought of as a means of conveying something else – knowledge, opinions, messages, styles, symbolic gestures and so on. Textual Scholarship treats texts as texts, i.e. as phenomena that emerge, exist and change under certain conditions. Texts are created, handed down and often pass from one medium to another (e.g. from handwriting to a book, or from print to digital).

Textual scholarship is a collective term for a range of related disciplines at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics (NorS):

  • Scholarly Editing
  • Book and Media History
  • Digital Text Theory
  • The Sociology of Literature
  • Archival Studies
  • The History of Reading.

Scholarly Editing is about making important texts accessible to researchers and the public and the principles behind this work. Book and Media History studies the book as part of a literary ecosystem of authors, publishers, critics and readers. The Sociology of literature understands a text as a point of intersection between its origin and its reception history, between production and reading. Even at the formative stage, a text expresses more than just the author’s intention. Indeed, most contemporary texts are born out of a partnership between an author and an editor or publisher, as well as a typesetter and proofreader. The point of departure of Textual Scholarship is the material text, with all the connotations implied by the design of the actual document – the typography, format, cover, paper quality and illustrations in a book, or the design and hyperlinks in a digital edition. Archival Studies constitute the basis of the collective cultural memory, and the whole cycle is predicated on the text being actively acquired through reading.

Textual scholarship has far-reaching implications for the understanding of the content of texts, the analysis of literary works and the history of literature. Scholarly Editing reminds us that literary works consist of numerous variations and versions and that each edition (scholarly or not) is always an interpretation per se. The understanding of the connotations of the medium derived from the history of the book help anchor analyses of literature in tangible empirical evidence and a provide room for a broader concept of the text. The insights into the principles of text encoding afforded by digital text theory open up new perspectives for text analysis. The Sociology of Literature, like Archival Studies and The History of Reading, seeks to problematise the canonical history of literature by identifying the literature that has actually been written, transcribed, printed, sold, borrowed and read. The printed book may have been the dominant text medium since the 16th century, but handwritten texts existed both before and after Gutenberg, just as printed books and digital texts exist side by side today. Textual Scholarship encompasses this whole field, both in practice and as a form of theoretical reflection.

The Textual Scholarship Research Group seeks to:

  • systematise interaction between research and teaching in the department
  • raise the profile of textual scholarship in NorS and beyond
  • facilitate the establishment of a network of individual and collective projects in the field of textual scholarship
  • optimise the way in which the department communicates its expertise in textual scholarship to the general public
  • provide teaching in the textual scholarship disciplines.

The Textual Scholarship Research Group at NorS has built up relationships with a range of external partners: The Saxo Institute and the Department of Communication (formerly the Royal School of Library and Information Science), both at the University of Copenhagen, the Society for Danish Language and Literature and the Royal Library, as well as other universities in Denmark and abroad (Aarhus, Lund, Uppsala, Zurich and Basel).

The members of the research group work with a range of publishers and organisations in Denmark and abroad: The Society for Danish Language and Literature, Universitets-Jubilæets danske Samfund, Arbeitsgemeinschaft philosophischer Editionen, Arbeitsgemeinschaft für germanistische Edition, and the European Society for Textual Scholarship. They are also part of international networks such as the Nordic Network for Textual Critics, the Nordic Forum for Book History, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), the Nordic-Baltic-Russian Network on the History of Books, Libraries, and Reading (HIBOLIRE) and Medieval Nordic Text Archive (MENOTA).

Textual scholarship research is conveyed by lectures, articles, books and teaching. Members of the research group have often taught at NorS on the course “Texts, books and bits: An introduction to book history, scholarly editing and digital text theory”. The members also have a wide range of contacts and positions involving dissemination. Several of them act as consultants, editors and supervisors for projects involving all kinds of text production, applying the latest textual scholarship research in practice, and feeding into research what they learn about the real-life problems editors encounter on a daily basis. A number of students who have pursued studies in textual scholarship have subsequently been employed to work on various editorial projects.