Scribes, Printers, and the Accidentals of their Texts

For some twenty years, the archaeology of texts has increasingly been extended to studying the material that serves as a container for both manuscripts and printed texts, thus turning into an archaeology of the book. Free from preconceptions about a priori differences between the hand-written and the printed medium, the editors and the authors of the volume under review set out to scrutinize the ‘accidentals’ (after Walter Greg) of manuscripts and printed books alike. Accidental variants may have an impact on the ‘substantives’ of a text, thus some of the articles as much as the volume in general highlight phenomena that imply gradual rather than clear-cut distinctions, as the editors admit in their “Introduction” (pp. 9–13, here at p. 9).