Beredte Verbesserungen

It is a special property of handwritten texts that in most cases they show material traces of their process of production. Corrections applied by scribes and other persons during the production or transmission process can be interpreted in different ways: to ascertain the status of a text (copy, adaptation, or act of creation), to distinguish persons collaborating in the scriptorium including their different tasks, to observe more or less professional strategies of how scribes tried to eliminate errors or to optimize their texts - this cognition gives us an insight into the education and competence of scribes. However, a common terminology to talk about phenomena of text revision as a whole has not yet been established nor do most scholarly editions reproduce them sufficiently, so that research of historical processes of text production is not easily conducted. In this contribution, the author lists and defines four categories of text revision that can be found in medieval manuscripts (deletion, transformation, insertion and transposition) as well as their multifold materialized manifestation. This is seen as the preliminary stage in developing a set of TEI-XML-based models for describing this special field of medieval writing - as suggested in the closely connected contribution of Hofmeister/Böhm/Klug in this volume -, in order to support an interdisciplinary discussion about this previously underestimated pool of information.