Paolo Trovato, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann’s Method.

Paolo Trovato, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann’s Method. A Non-Standard Handbook of Genealogical Textual Criticism in the Age of Post-Structuralism, Cladistics, and Copy-Text, Padova, libreriauniversitaria.it edizioni, 2014 (Storie e linguaggi).

ISBN 978-88-6292-528-0, 29,90 euro

“This book, written with the non-Italian reader in mind, addresses a central problem in textual criticism, and one that it is currently fashionable to regard as insoluble, namely, how to reconstruct a text of the past so that it is as close as possible to the lost original, starting from a number of copies more or less full of mistakes. The idea of writing this book – which I left to age, as one does with wine and cured meats – first occurred to me in 2006-2007, when I had the privilege of being a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As the students felt the need to explain to me: ‘Nobody had ever talked to us about these things.’ For decades, very few, if any, Biblical, Germanic and Slavonic philologists, or French Romanists, or German editors of Anglo-American or Medieval Latin texts, have been talking about many of the things this book is about” (from the author’s preface).