Report of the Committee on Scholarly Editions

Extract

The Committee on Scholarly Editions offers numerous and varied services to editors and publishers of any kind of work or document—in print or in manuscript, in any language, from any period. In offering these services, the committee recognizes that varying editorial projects require varying editorial policies and procedures. A nineteenth-century Spanish novel and an English diplomat's papers clearly require different treatments, as do a twentieth-century poem and a medieval romance. Editing a work that survives in variant texts is different from editing the only extant text of another. The committee believes, however, that some issues are common to almost all scholarly editing and that these issues—both theoretical and practical—can be clarified and focused through communication among persons from widely varying fields.