Meeting on Textual Criticism

A meeting on manuscripts and methods in production of “critical editions” has been organized by Fanni Publications in Tehran on May 24.

Titled ‘Manuscript Copies and Textual Criticism,’ the meeting starts at 4:30 pm with the participation of two prominent scholars, at the publication’s premises located on Mir Emad Street, ILNA reported.

Textual criticism (the process of attempting to ascertain the original wording of a text) is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants in either manuscripts or printed books. The textual critic’s ultimate objective is the production of a “critical edition.”

Ali Bahramian, 49, researcher in early history of Islam, faculty member of the Great Islamic Encyclopedia and head of the cataloging department at the Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopedia, is one of the guests.

The other is Houman Abbaspour, 53, editor, author, essayist, linguist, translator, index writer, expert in literary typology and methodologist in academic and encyclopedic projects.

Both scholars will give lectures and explain why and how the textual variants in some manuscripts were created. They will also take questions from the audience.

The meeting will highlight the significance of the manuscripts and help researchers in textual criticism and other challenging tasks in the field of codicology.

  Commemoration of Scholar Ahmad Monzavi

Part of the meeting will be dedicated to commemoration of bibliographer, codicologist and catalog scholar Ahmad Monzavi (1925-2015). He cataloged the manuscripts at Malek Library-Museum and Majlis Library in Tehran among other archives.

To provide a shared list of Persian manuscripts, Monzavi travelled in 1977 to Islamabad at the invitation of the Pakistani government to work on Persian manuscripts and stayed there for 16 years, according to IBNA.

The result of his work in Islamabad’s Ganj Bakhsh Library at the Iran-Pakistan Institute of Persian Studies, which only has Persian manuscripts, was four  published volumes of Manuscript Catalogues.

Among his other works in the period is a publication on the celebrated Iranian poet Saadi of Shiraz (1210-1292) based on Pakistani manuscripts, on the occasion of the poet’s 800th anniversary.

Also in this period, he published 14 volumes of the shared indices of Persian manuscripts in Pakistan, and founded the index writing of Persian books.