The Worthy Variant: Thoughts on Oral and Scribal Performance

By way of introduction to the workshop, I will give an overview of some of the key questions surrounding the historical significance of variant readings that cut across disciplinary boundaries. The traditional method of textual criticism, envisaging a textual archetype and working its way to it through conjunctural scribal errors, has long come under severe scrutiny, notably in the case of traditional performance poetry. Yet alternative models struggle to impose themselves, and debates are ongoing in several scholarly communities. I will concentrate on variants that cannot be explained in terms of scribal error or outright modernisation, and on the theoretical spectrum of ‘oral’, ‘aural’, and ‘scribal’ variants.