This course is an introduction to the basics of critical editing for students of Asian languages.

Students will enter the atelier of critical editors of Asian works, with a focus on religious texts: they will understand the purposes of inventories, descriptions, and collations of textual witnesses, studies of their genealogy, examination and choice of the variants, and reconstructions of the best texts. The course may also select specific topics in Asian textual cultures, involve the study of sources in their original format, and convey specialized notions in paleography, codicology, bibliography, stemmatics, and digital humanities.

This course is based on the assumption that philology is a hermeneutic enterprise that centers the text and is therefore neither Anglocentric, nor Eurocentric, nor simply obsolete. Indeed, every text has been historically transmitted, reconstructed, received, or even falsified. However, the present disciplines, categories, strategies, and techniques of classical philology were developed in a European milieu and tailored to the needs of European languages. The course will therefore critically assess these current Eurocentric categories, techniques, etc… in order to adapt them to the various Asian textual traditions, especially religious ones.

The broader purpose of this course is to nourish the awareness that our historicity shapes our interpretation. As such, the course will be useful to all textually oriented students.