Within the terms of Anneliese Maier Research Award for Research on Practices of Textual Editing, convenor Glenn W. Most brings together 20 international researchers to discuss issues connected to textual variants comparatively within important Classical traditions. How scholars in different traditions react to textual variants; what methods have been devised in certain traditions in order to reduce the frequency with which variants occur; what principles and methods have been developed in order to deal with such variants when they have occurred?

 Although the fact of textual variation in general is doubtless an anthropological universal, the specific forms it takes and the specific attitudes to its occurrence seem to vary widely from culture to culture. How variations develop in different cultures, on the basis of which forms of scholarly practices, collaborations, and institutional frameworks; what variants say about a culture’s understandings of text, authorship, and collective authorship; what happens when variants become creative and generate their own strands of tradition; to what degree changes in transmission media and processes of distribution, translations, or the migration of texts into different cultural or institutional contexts can influence or be influenced by the development of variants — these are questions that can only be addressed productively in a historical and culturally comparative perspective.

AnonymClassic's Principal Investigator, Beatrice Gruendler, presents her findings about the sophisticated transmission techniques of the Arabic textual traditions.