Il futuro dell’edizione critica (cioè lachmanniana), più o meno digitale. Riflessioni (in)attuali Critical (Lachmannian) Editions - a More or Less Digital Future? Reflections, New and Old

Against the opinion (false, to my mind) that Lachmannian textual criticism consists only in outdated technicalities, other voices, much more authoritative, but perhaps unheeded and certainly less mainstream, support the contrary view. Among the numerous aspects of this debate, by no means secondary is the constitution of digital text and apparatus in cases of complex recensio: between the extremes of a Lachmannian selective apparatus, and of a Bédier-style “democratic” one, the rules for a comprehensive digital apparatus remain to be created, and the enormous technical problems of tagging cannot and must not obscure the quintessentially scientific ones of the critical approach. With a series of operational reflections on two case studies (Cicero and Seneca the Philosopher), I try to trace a pathway that, while keeping a proper distance from any antiscientific, anticritical, antilachmannian, descriptive and genetic drift, makes it possible to find, if one exists, a principium individuationis of the digital edition, with repercussions backwards, so to speak, on the choice of variants in the apparatus as traditionally printed.