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.

With Aurea personet lira, a poem about the nightingale’s enchanting song circulated across 11th-century Europe. We can assume that it was sung; the text, the material display, as well as the musical notation in the extant manuscripts are highly variant, with two distinct versions whose priority cannot be clarified. This finding will serve as an opportunity to present the state of debate in Medieval Latin (and Medieval German) lyric studies: What is the spectrum of variants exhibited in Medieval Latin lyric, and how does editorial philology deal with them? What steps can we take to assess them? Since the variation of the nightingale poem is most likely (also) rooted in performance practice: How, if at all, can we distinguish oral and written variants, by looking only at the transmitted text? In their shared textual findings and methodological problems, the paper will thus relate the debate on medieval lyric to the debate on Homeric epics, in an attempt to find productive common grounds.

The manuscript conventionally called the Book of Aneirin is a small thirteenth-century manuscript from North Wales showing several interesting features. On the one hand, it is the sole witness of a poetic corpus known as The Gododdin, a catalogue of the heroes of the Gododdin, a North-British tribe (situated around the Firth of Forth, its capital being Eidyn, i.e. Edinburgh) that perished in the turmoil of the early middle ages. On the other hand, the most peculiar feature in the context of the present workshop is the fact that the manuscript contains copies of two different sources, entered in the manuscript by two different scribes. This means that we actually have not one but two different versions of The Gododdin. So far, the few experts in Wales and abroad who tackled this corpus have attempted to reconstruct an archetype underlying the two versions. However, it is far from clear that these attempts at a reconstruction have been successful. In my paper, I will deal with the problems that make such an attempt at a reconstruction difficult (or downright impossible?), and I will present my attempt at an explanation of what underlies the two versions.

Tocharian literature is almost limited to Buddhist texts, which are ultimately based on the Indian tradition. On the other hand, all Buddhist genres are attested, although only fragments of works have survived. Of particular interest are the poetic texts, either as stand-alone poems (kavyas) or as metrical passages in plays or dramatized narratives. There is reason to believe that a large part of the poetic and narrative literature is a genuine Tocharian creation and has not simply been translated from Indian originals. Variations in Tocharian poetry are twofold: (1) deviations from the Indic originals that betray a genuine local tradition of performative art; (2) linguistic variations that betray different sociolinguistic layers: dialectal treatments, standard and substandard varieties, and even some artificial art language (kunstsprache). The paper will give an overview of both types of variations and draw some conclusions about the transfer of Buddhist art and its local adaptation.

Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa is one of the foundational and most popular court epics of early mediaeval India, which survives in thousands of manuscripts and on which more than fifty commentaries were composed in the mediaeval and early modern period. No wonder that the text has a long and exceptionally rich transmissional history. Apart from clear cases of textual corruption, one can also discern instances of deliberate change, when a perceived grammatical or stylistic fault, or an inconsistency with socio-religious norms was ‘corrected’ by the transmitters. Such cases are often discussed by the commentators. The paper is going to show some salient examples of such change

The Purāṇas arguably belong to the most voluminous and enduring genres of Sanskrit literature. As a narrative genre these anonymous texts have a didactic character and deal with such diverse topics as ritual, devotion, theology, philosophy, pilgrimage, and much more. While their beginnings go back to the start of the first millennium CE, most existing Purāṇas have been composed many centuries later, making up hundreds of historically layered texts. Purāṇas show a tendency to expand and change over time, as they were copied in a process of ‘composition-in-transmission’, attesting to their continued and lively use as a body of ‘living texts’. In this paper, I will introduce some examples from the vast Purāṇic text corpus to discuss and reflect upon issues of transmission, variation, and appropriation. I argue that significant variants in the Purāṇas reflect an ongoing discourse and dialogue within a living and constantly evolving tradition. Despite their professed claims of authenticity and primordiality, the canon of the Purāṇas is not fixed but has always been open and subject to change.

Recent research on Babylonian literary production in the Hellenistic period has led to progress in two areas in particular: the improvement of palaeographic knowledge for the latest period of Cuneiform writing puts the dating of undated manuscripts and fragments on a much firmer footing, and the propria of the original production of Babylonian literati of the Hellenistic period – normally priests – have been established with greater clarity. Building on this work, it is intriguing to assess manuscripts from this period that are copies of older compositions belonging to the ‘stream of tradition’ for reflexes of their particular period of origin. The presentation will look at two cases in particular: one taken from the corpus of the so-called ‘love lyrics’ (a corpus of ritual texts, which, with Edzard, can be said to be neither lovely nor lyrical), and one pertaining to the Babylonian Theodicy.

Even though the great works of cuneiform literature are now mostly distributed under uniform titles, few people know that the Babylonian Flood Story or the Epic of Gilgamesh have come down to us in several versions on many different manuscripts with sometimes serious variations.This paper explores the different natures and backgrounds of such variations, opposing different epic versions from different time periods as well as different copies from the same period. Examples are mainly introduced form the Epic of Anzu, but also from other important compositions, such as the “Babylonian Epic of Creation” Enuma elish and the epic Erra and Ishum. 

This presentation will attempt to give a sense of the state of play concerning variations in the textual transmission of early Greek, and particularly Homeric, epic. I will survey rival theories about the genesis of the text and provide a brief overview of textual history, concentrating on a watershed around 150 BCE. We will then look at a few examples of early variant texts on papyrus and consider the cultural and mechanical processes by which they might have come about. To conclude, I want to consider why the Greek tradition provides the relatively restricted degree of variation that it does.