Variety Of Texts Research Articles

1QIsaa, OG, and MT Isaiah 63:3

Abstract The substantial textual variation among three major witnesses to Isa 63:3 (1QIsaa, OG, and MT) has received relatively little attention in the commentary literature and in the scholarly journals and monographs. These witnesses attest to a short text (1QIsaa), a long text (OG), and an even longer text (MT). The present article proposes that the OG Vorlage is an expansion of a pre-1QIsaa text, while the MT is an expansion of 1QIsaa.

Лексическая вариативность в руськомовных переводах Żywotów Świętych Петра Скарги: житие свт. Афанасия Великого

In order to clarify the textual history of manuscript copies of the Ruthenian Life of St Athanasius of Alexandria, translated from Piotr Skarga’s Żywoty Świętych, the article analyses the variety of the most frequent lexemes of the Life using methods of textual criticism. Variants of the seven considered lexemes of each of the 13 manuscript copies of the Life, grouped in tables, show the direction of lexical changes, as well as the interaction between manuscript copies of two different translations of the same Polish original. It is shown that the vocabulary of the manuscript copies Sof. 278, Sof. 279, KPL 370, KPL 371, CAM KDA 674 of the second more widespread translation must have been slightly edited according to the manuscript copy of NTŠ 322 (or a similar textual type) of the first translation. The manuscript copies EPARCH. 460, BN 15628 of the second translation contain traises of secondary interaction with a different type of texts. The data also shows the editing of lexems of the archetype Šept. 31, NTŠ 322 according to the manuscript copie of other translation. The results of the study of lexical variability complement and agree with the results of the analysis of the conflate readings and alternative textual variants found in the manuscript copies of St Athanasius' Life, according to which additional variants of the text were used in a number of manuscript copies of the Life during the rewriting of the antigraph.

Reevaluation and Renewed Readings

Abstract The pericope of David’s heroes is a scholarly junction of textual variation and literary-historical details regarding the military unit of David’s Heroes. This article reevaluates the spectrum of extant textual variants relating to the literary structure of this pericope in its two occurrences, at 2 Sam 23:8–39 and 1 Chr 11:11–47, with emphasis on the question of “warriors of the third rank,” with the aim of arriving at a better understanding of the structure of both the literary pericope and the military unit it describes. The textual reevaluation leads to the conclusion that, contrary to the preferred status of MT-Samuel in leading literary-historical studies, readings extant in other versions are to be preferred, while unique MT-Samuel readings, and the historiographical information they reflect, should be understood as either corruptions, reflections of a secondary tradition, or interpretation.

"Diwani Hikmet" Collection Versions and Their Textology

The scientific article “Versions of the collection “Diwani hikmet” and their textology” is devoted to the analysis of different collection versions Hoja Ahmed Yasawi hikmets, known as “Diwan Hikmet”. The article covers the issues of textology, variant text and its evolution over time. The study begins with a historical overview of the collection, emphasizing its importance in the cultural and literary heritage. The authors examine various versions of “Diwani Hikmet” and offer a detailed textual analysis, identifying differences and similarities between them. The main emphasis is on identifying variants of the text introduced by different copyists and editors over time. The authors consider the influence of cultural and historical contexts in shaping these versions, and highlight key points that determine textual diversity. The article also emphasizes the importance of this study for a better understanding of the Sufi poetry and philosophy of Hoja Ahmed Yasawi. The authors argue that analyzing the textuality of Diwani hikmet not only reveals its evolution, but also helps shed light on the historical and cultural aspects of Sufism in Kazakhstan. Thus, the article provides a valuable perspective on the «Diwani Hikmet» collection versions, its textology and its significance for understanding the spiritual heritage of Hoja Ahmed Yasawi in the modern research context.

The Instruction of a Man for His Son in Finland (O. SES 23)

This short article is the publication of a hieratic ostracon (O. SES 23) from the Ramesside Period in the collection of the Finnish Egyptological Society that preserves parts of the title, the exordium, and the first paragraph of The Instruction of a Man for His Son. The provenance and the exact acquisition history of the ostracon are unknown, but indirect evidence suggests that it derives from Deir el-Medina and was acquired in Luxor by the late Professor of Egyptology in Finland, Rostislav Holthoer, in the early 1970s. A textual variant in line three, also attested in another ostracon from Deir el-Medina, suggests that the first paragraph of the composition does not juxtapose the life of a scribe with that of a farmer, as is commonly believed, but instead with that of a soldier. [Formula: see text]

Юкагирская сказка о маленьком охотнике на лося: семантика образа (в сопоставлении с якутской сказкой)

The purpose of the study is to reveal the semantics of one of the characters of the oral folk art of the forest yukaghirs – a small moose hunter. The variant texts of the Yukaghirs with this character are analyzed in comparison with the Yakut folklore material, where there is a plot similar to the Yukaghir one. The scientific novelty consists in revealing the original meaning of the image of the little elk hunter and individual elements of the plot about him in the context of ethnographic data, folklore studies. As a result of the study, it is shown that the actions of the hero characterize him as endowed with magical skills: he commands the winds associated with different sides of the world and uses them to move in space, which is interpreted as a journey through the worlds; with an effort of thought, he materializes a boat and returns home on it, which goes back to crossing a water barrier as the border between worlds; gets moose, being inside it, like those with supernatural abilities. The symbolism of these actions is associated with the themes of transition to the other world, death and rebirth. In the story of a small craftsman, mythological codes are hidden behind the general content of the fairy tale, which focuses on the external data of the hero, who eventually dies in an absurd way. The shift in the meanings of folklore narration allows us to consider a fairy tale as a humorous plot, a tall tale.

Manuscripts of the Treatise “Hadīqat Al-'Ārifīn” of Ishāq Khoja Bin Ismâ‘Īl Ata

Reliability and validity of written sources is always critical in research. A key step in conducting thorough and accurate research is to find the most reliable and original versions of written sources. Researchers often rely on primary sources to ensure the highest level of credibility and accuracy in their work. Factors such as the preservation of the manuscript, the integrity of the text, the circumstances of the copying, and the environment in which the author and scribes worked and lived all contribute to determining the reliability and significance of a source. Paleographical and codicological data play a critical role in understanding the history and provenance of manuscripts, allowing researchers to assess their authenticity and importance in the context of their time and place. Analysis of such data can help shed light on research into these historical documents. Therefore, in the article we try to describe the paleographic and codicological features of the manuscripts of “Hadīqat al-’Ārifīn”, preserved in the book collections of Tashkent, Kokand, Kabul, Uppsala. Undoubtedly, this comparative analysis can provide valuable insight into the main dogmatists of the Yasavī Sufi school. By comparing different versions of the manuscript from different collections, researchers can analyze textual variations and stylistics that can shed light on the development and interpretation of Yasavī 's teachings within the Sufi tradition. The manuscript copies help to understand the evolution and transmission of Yasavī 's spiritual and philosophical ideas across different regions and time periods. Keywords: Khoja Ahmad Yasavī, Ishāq Khoja, Ismā‘īl Ata, “Hadīqat al-’Ārifīn”, Turkistan Tashkent.

The Interpolation of 1 Cor. 14.34–35 and the Reversal of the Name Order of Prisca and Aquila at 1 Cor. 16.19

Transpositions of large sections of text in New Testament manuscripts occurred only when omissions and chronological problems were ‘corrected’. It is argued here that the words commanding that women be silent in 1 Cor. 14.34–35, which appear elsewhere in Western manuscripts, were interpolated, and the interpolator probably created a textual variant at 14.37 and transposed Prisca and Aquila at 16.19 so that a woman would not host a church. Textual variants at 16.19 in the Western manuscripts are explicable if Prisca originally preceded Aquila here, as she does elsewhere. Second Timothy 4.19 is an early witness to Prisca’s precedence in 1 Corinthians.

HERESY AND ORTHODOXY: A TEXTUAL VARIANT IN THOMAS MANN'S DOKTOR FAUSTUS

ABSTRACTThis article draws upon a textual variant in Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus, and proceeds to investigate the issue which it raises: the role of heresy in the novel, and the question of whether the heretical in art is more accessible or inaccessible than the orthodox. Heresy and its opposite, the orthodox or the ‘pious’, as Mann normally describes it, are categories of religious thought, used by Mann in a transferred sense to convey the spiritual and intellectual dilemma of the modern artist. Given that Adrian Leverkühn is a composer, and that the reader therefore needs to take Mann's description (through the narrator Zeitblom) of his music ‘on trust’, the thesis of this article is that an understanding of the sources within the Christian heretical tradition upon which Leverkühn draws for his compositions is necessary for the reader's understanding of the nature of his music and its relationship to the artistic tradition which it both acknowledges and rejects. The article also posits the decisive influence upon Doktor Faustus of the treatment of heresy in Dostoevsky's major novels. It concludes by considering a further associated textual detail with regard to the question of salvation.

Listening to First Quartos: The Women of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V

ABSTRACT The so-called ‘bad’ quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays have long been treated as superfluous. However, recent debates suggest that these publications are not corrupt but may instead be Shakespeare’s early drafts, opening up a conversation about how to treat the textual disparities between the early quartos and the 1623 folio. This article examines two variant texts in light of this assessment. The early quartos of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) and Henry V (1600) offer moments where female characters display an agency that is silenced and controlled in the more canonical texts of the folio, suggesting that, as he revised the plays, Shakespeare moved to restrict women’s behaviour. For example, the titular Merry Wives design and orchestrate the final masque in the quarto text of that play, while they cede artistic control to their husbands in the later folio version. So too, in Henry V, Katherine’s final scene in the quarto gives her the opportunity to speak more and to assert an equality with Henry in a passage unique to that text. Attention to the gender dynamics of revision demonstrates that, to understand the full range of feminist potential within Shakespeare’s canon, scholars must explore his plays’ textual variation.

Mouvance and the art of fiction in performance in manuscripts of a Demotic Egyptian novella

Substantial textual variation found across manuscripts of a Demotic Egyptian novella, The prebend of Amun, bears upon closer examination the features of mouvance, a kind of textual impermanence found in written versions of literature for which performance contexts are not only ongoing but are constitutive of their very textual shape. Alongside this mouvance, manuscripts of this work also maintain a high level of similarity and coherence down to the phrasal and word level. I argue that this unique combination of sameness and mouvance points to the desire of performers who possessed libretto-like copies of The prebend of Amun to tweak their texts in order to match their understanding of this work of prose fiction.

A Typical Case of "Cross Time" Revision

Wang Jingzhi's The Winds of Cymbidium is the first true collection of love poems since the May 4th Movement, and it has had a tremendous impact on the new poetry scene. The poetry collection has changed in the 1922 version, the 1957 version, and the 1992 version. Among them, the texts from the 1922 version and the 1957 version have strong changes. Through reading the complicated variant texts in the original text and the auxiliary text of these two editions, this paper deeply analyzes the important influence of new literary contexts such as social ideology and literary policies and norms on the "cross-time" revision of poetry collections, and analyzes the poets' aesthetic mentality trajectories in different periods, the ways of coping with The Times, and their gains and losses.

A search tool based on language modelling developed for The Index of Middle English Prose

Non-standardised early vernaculars present a problem for search tools due to the high degree of variation. The challenge lies in the variation found in orthography, syntax, and lexicon between titles, incipits, and explicits in manuscript copies of the same work. Traditional search methods relying on exact string matching or regular expressions fail to address these variations comprehensively. This project presents a web-based search tool specifically designed to handle linguistic and textual variation. The software is made available as a part of the Index of Middle English Prose (IMEP). The search tool addresses the issue of variation by utilizing a database of incipits and explicits, character-based n-gram language models (LMs) built with the Stanford Research Institute Language Modelling (SRILM) toolkit, and a fuzzy search script (IMEP: FSS) written in Python. The tool optimizes for recall, retrieving multiple potential matches for a search string, without attempting to identify the ‘correct’ one. The search process involves looking up exact matches in the database while simultaneously using the fuzzy search script to evaluate the incipits and explicits against a model of the search string, followed by a match of the search string against models of the incipits and explicits. This two-step process shortens the processing time, which would otherwise be unreasonably long, because while using SRILM to match the search string against each incipit or explicit in the IMEP for precision could be time-consuming, running a first step where all texts are matched against a single LM built from the search string allows for faster processing. A web application, built using Django and Docker, combines the results of the direct database lookup and the fuzzy search script, presenting them as a list with exact matches followed by fuzzy matches ordered by increasing model perplexity. The tool is made available Open Access and can be adapted to other datasets.

A Prince, the Literati, and the Emperor: Two Faces of One Shuihu Play by Zhu Youdun

Abstract Zhu Youdun, the prince of Zhou and the grandson of the Ming founding emperor, wrote and published thirty-one zaju plays. While Zhu Youdun’s plays have been well-researched in drama scholarship, their publication, circulation, and textual variations emerging from transmission among different audiences are rarely studied. Situating Zhu Youdun’s zaju writing and publishing activities as part of Ming princely publishing, this paper examines and compares two editions of Black Whirlwind Li Spurns Riches Out of Righteousness as a case study, one the printed edition circulating mainly among literati audience/readers and the other the heavily adapted manuscript edition based on inner palace performance for the imperial audience.

The Intrinsic Probability of τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀνδράσιν ὑποτασσέσθωσαν in Eph. 5.22

This study revisits a contested textual variant concerning the presence, placement, and person of an imperative directed at wives in Eph. 5.22. Most previous treatments of this variant have decided the matter (typically in favor of the reading without an imperative) on the basis of manuscript support and transcriptional arguments about how readers and copyists of the text would have changed it, but the intrinsic probabilities of what the author would have written based on his argument and style have generally been neglected. This study fills this gap by assessing the intrinsic probabilities of the variant readings in Eph. 5.22 using discourse and information structure, the pragmatics of the Greek imperative, and stylistic observations in Ephesians. As a result of this analysis, the reading with the highest intrinsic probability is shown to be τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀνδράσιν ὑποτασσέσθωσαν, which bolsters the recent case made by Gurry (2021) for the same reading.

Narratological implications of the differences between the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint: 1 Samuel 10.5 and 13.1–4 as a case study

This article illustrates the importance of considering the narratological implications of textual variations in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. While these differences have traditionally concerned textual critics, this study argues for their importance in the field of narrative analysis as well. Using the divergent readings in 1 Samuel 10.5 and 1 Sam. 13.1–4 as a case study, the article analyzes the potential meaning and implications of these textual variants by showing how the different readings can offer new perspectives and uncharted avenues of interpretation, expanding our understanding of the Greek text as a distinct literary work. By bridging textual criticism and narrative analysis, this article aims to contribute to a deeper appreciation of the narratological dimensions inherent in the Septuagint and highlight its significance in the broader field of biblical narratology.

Celebrità e metateatro: ‘Adriana Lecouvreur’ per Adelaide Ristori

In the first half of the 18th century, Adrienne Lecouvreur, diva of the Comédie-Française, brought about a profound change in the French recitative style. Triumphs with the public, rivalries, unhappy love affairs, mysterious circumstances of death and excommunication made her a myth. In 1849, Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé wrote a successful drama for the famous actress Rachel, whose biography resembled that of her 18th century colleague. Adelaide Ristori played Adriana Lecouvreur for fifteen years from 1852. Just as Lecouvreur, who came from humble beginnings, was able to build up a public persona thanks to her talent and high-ranking acquaintances, Ristori, coming from the world of the guitti, had the same fierce ambition and was only recently able to bear the official title of Marquise Capranica del Grillo. Through contemporary printed sources and unpublished documents, mainly from her big archive (correspondence, administrative papers, and scripts), this essay has a twofold aim: on the one hand, to examine the instrumental use that Ristori made of the Lecouvreur character to consolidate her fame among Italian and international audiences; on the other, to identify the peculiarities of her interpretation, the stage evolution, the textual variants.

I costruttori di rovine. Tempo e palinsesti in Carlo Bordini

This paper delves into the temporal function of the concepts of rubbles and ruins in the literary works of Carlo Bordini. The initial part of this study aims to identify the styles and forms in which rubbles and ruins manifest, with a particular focus on two exemplary books, namely, Polvere (Empirìa 1999) and Sasso (Scheiwiller 2008). In the second part rubbles and ruins are examined from a philological perspective, specifically in relation to the use of textual variants, especially within certain textual palimpsests constructed by Bordini. Following a systematic classification of the various types of variants encountered in his works, the analysis shifts to the final two poetry collections, Poesie color mogano (Tic 2020) and Un vuoto d’aria (Mondadori 2021, posthumous), offering critical commentary on select instances.

Textual Criticism, Literary Criticism, and State Capture: Returning 3 Reigns 12:24p–t to the Canon of Local African Communities

This article begins by considering the relationship between textual variants and the canonical text, arguing for a fuller presence of significant variant readings alongside the canonical text, in line with contemporary textual critical scholarship and their associated eclectic critical editions. Alongside such eclectic critical editions and their appropriation within Bible translation, this article suggests that a community-based approach like Contextual Bible Study could be used to return significant and relevant variants to ordinary African readers and hearers of the Bible. The article argues that LXX 3 Reigns 12:24p–t is such a significant and relevant textual variant, offering as it does a remarkable resonance with contemporary South African concerns about state capture. The article analyses 24p–t as a significant textual variant in text critical terms, as significant narrative literature in its own right, as a coherent economic narrative analysis concerning the cause of the division of the united monarchy, and as a potential resource for Contextual Bible Study work within the contemporary South African context of state capture.

Reconsidering 4Q69 (4QpapIsap)

Abstract 4Q69 consists of two small papyrus fragments treating to Isa 5:28–30. Following Raffaella Cribiore’s criterion for identification of scribal exercises, an analysis of the textual variants to which the 4Q69 fragments attest will serve as a platform for exploring why the scribe(s) chose papyrus instead of parchment as his medium, the implications of the scroll’s column width, and the significance of its semi-cursive script and calligraphic traits. Engaging in a holistic assessment of the scroll’s purpose and use, this paper submits that rather than constituting a complete copy of the biblical book of Isaiah, it is a partial copy for use as a scribal exercise of a mid-level student. It thus sheds light on the educational process underlying the production of 4Q69 as the importance attached to the book of Isaiah during the Second Temple period and the book’s distinctive, authoritative status.