Written tradition

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Written tradition describes the writing of the oral tradition . Similar to the foreign word tradition , “tradition” means either the transmission , i.e. the process of passing on a text, or what has been handed down , i.e. the text itself as the result of the transmission - then it is consequently about the content that, thanks to the transmission, becomes Available.

The written transmission is considered to be particularly reliable, for example in the case of manuscripts , although oral transmission can also be reliable if used critically, e.g. B. show some successes of the so-called oral history . The scientific methods of textual criticism are used to check the authenticity and reliability of the written transmission.

A distinction is made in the written tradition between

  1. direct transmission (primary transmission, the transmission of a text by copying the entire text or large parts of it independently of other texts) and
  2. indirect transmission (secondary transmission, when parts of a text have found their way into other texts as quotations and are passed on as parts of the new text).

See also

literature

  • Hans Gerstinger: Inventory and tradition of the literary works of Greco-Roman antiquity. Kienreich, Graz 1948.
  • Manfred Landfester (Hrsg.): History of the ancient texts. Lexicon of authors and works (= Der Neue Pauly. Supplements. Volume 2). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2007.
  • Egert Pöhlmann : Introduction to the history of transmission and the textual criticism of ancient literature (The Classical Studies). Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1994.
  • Leighton D. Reynolds and Nigel Guy Wilson : Scribes and scholars. A guide to the transmission of Greek and Latin literature . 3. Edition. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1992, ISBN 0-19-872145-5 .

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