Sarah Neville "Nihil biblicum a me alienum puto: W.W. Greg, Bibliography, and the Sociology of Texts"

In recent years, textbooks and comprehensive overviews of textual theory have presented the impression that there are solid divisions between editorial approaches that may be delineated for curious readers. Of particular note is the distinction made between the positivistic eclecticism of author-centred, copy-text editing and the relativistic, historically-inflected approaches of materialism or reception theory. The fact of the distinctions between the older and newer approaches to editing of texts is made explicit by the implicit assumption that the work of those espousing authorial models somehow failed to account for the contingencies of history and sociology; in other words, “the old ways of approaching texts were deficient, so we built new ones.” The following paper rebuts this suggestion by illustrating the ways that one decisive theoretical work was particularly responsible for misrepresenting the attitudes of its precursors, creating a false dichotomy between editorial approaches that now pervades all-too-many debates over the transmission of textual artifacts.