Periodic Reporting for period 3 - TEXTEVOLVE (A New Approach to the Evolution of Texts Based on the Manuscripts of the Targums)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-09-01 bis 2024-02-29
1) develop a new methodology for textual studies using techniques from evolutionary biology; and,
2) apply this methodology to an important corpus of Jewish texts, called the Targums.
The more manuscript copies of any given text one has, the more robust this analysis can be, so TEXEVOLVE also aims to:
3) expand the corpus of available texts by recovering manuscripts that have become ‘lost’ in un-catalogued or poorly catalogued collections; and,
4) subject recently discovered manuscripts, particularly those from the so-called ‘European Genizah’, to thorough textual analysis for the first time.
The boundaries of any historical discipline are determined by the primary sources available for study. By finding manuscripts that are currently unknown to the scholarly community and also by analysing previously un-studied manuscripts, TEXTEVOLVE has already proved its potential to move the discipline beyond the current state of the art. By the end of the project, we expect to have made a wealth of new primary sources available to the scholarly community.
Traditional approaches to texts that are extant only in multiple variant copies have sought to reconstruct the earliest possible form of the text recoverable by expunging or correcting secondary variants. TEXTEVOLVE, by contrast, adopts the guiding methodological principle that secondary changes also deserve consideration in their own right because they can tell us something about the ongoing function of the texts in the communities that transmitted them. It seeks to apply computer-based methods from the biological sciences to study this textual evolution, drawing an analogy between the way texts that have been repeatedly copied by hand change over time and evolutionary patterns in the natural world.