oa La question des recensions multiples dans l’édition critique des oeuvres anciennes ou médiévales

Favoured by the manuscript copy of texts, the fact that a single work is transmitted in several versions is for a critical editor a headache, connected with aspects as different as the construction of a stemma codicum, the interpretation of the work, the study of its diffusion and the search of its sources, etc. To make it clearer, we propose to recapitulate the different problems by those seven questions: Quis, quid, ubi, quibus auxiliis, cur, quomodo, quando. In other words, who reshaped the work, what is the nature of the modification, which manuscripts transmit each version, do they use different sources, what is the goal of the change, how was it done, is it possible to order chronologically the versions? An example from a work by Hugh of Saint Victor († 1141) shows that studying the manuscript transmission helps to identify the author of each version, to date them and to understand why and how the author reshaped its own work.