The Italian 'third way' of editing between globalization and localization

The dichotomy between conservation and reconstruction, between the historical value of each single manuscript and the diachronic perspective provided by the ‘stemma codicum’, between the copyist’s ‘truth’ and the author’s ‘truth’ has been at the core of the philological debate for over a century, starting even before the so-called ‘Bédierian 1913 revolution’. Well known are Bernard Cerquiglini’s accentuation of the ‘mouvance’ of medieval texts and the thence incented debate that favoured the consolidation of ‘New Philology’. What is perhaps less known is that the most innovative positions of the ‘return-to-the-manuscript’ approach were somehow anticipated in Italy by Pasquali, and then by Contini, Avalle, Segre and many others, who provided a sort of ‘third way’ to the aforementioned dichotomy. The paper provides a critical overview of what one might call ‘the Italian way of editing’, also in the light of the application of ICT methods and tools to textual criticism. A set of examples taken from the Electronic Hêliand Project, started in Venice in 2006, illustrates the most important issues at stake.