Introduction

The paper introduces to the essays by eight scholars from disparate areas of textual criticism, addressing a general main topic, that is philology and digital humanities, and dealing with old and new-Lachmannian approaches, anti-Lachmannian responses, treatments of varia lectio, stemmatology, qualitative and quantitative methods of textual inquiry, and the establishment of standards for digital scholarly editions. The investigated data sets comprise canonical ancient traditions, Byzantine scriptural Greek, the dawn of vernacular literacy, with Old Saxon, the still variable poetic and narrative corpora from the 12th century onwards, French and German epics, the reassessment of neo-Lachmannian procedures to Old French vernacular traditions, as that of the Bédierian Lai de l’ombre.