New philology is, in Medieval Studies, an intellectual movement which seeks to move beyond the text-critical method associated with to Karl Lachmann, which sought to gather manuscripts of a given text and use them reconstruct a version of that text as close as possible to the earliest written version (or "archetype"). In contrast, New Philology seeks to edit and study texts in the form in which they are attested. A key moment for the start of the movement was the 1989 publication of Bernard Cerquiglini's Eloge de la variante (In Praise of the Variant), which was critical of modernist positivist editorial practices for medieval texts. In the Anglophone world, the movement is particularly associated with a special issue of the Medieval Studies journal Speculum in 1990. A prominent step for the movement in the German-speaking world came in 1994 with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft symposium entitled "Der unfeste Text" ("the variable text"), where, for example, Joachim Bumke considered the history of transmission and textual criticism of courtly epics in the thirteenth century.

Further reading 

 Joachim Bumke: Der unfeste Text. Überlegungen zur Überlieferungsgeschichte und Textkritik der höfischen Epik im 13. Jahrhundert. In: „Aufführung“ und „Schrift“ in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit. Ed. by Jan-Dirk Müller. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung and Carl Ernst Poeschel Verlag 1996, 118–129.

 Bernard Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante. Histoire critique de la philologie. Paris 1989, esp. pp. 111–25 [Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant. A Critical History of Philology, trans. by Betsy Wing (Baltimore: [Parallax], 1999)].

 M. J. Driscoll, "The words on the page: Thoughts on philology, old and new", in: Creating the medieval saga: Versions, variability, and editorial interpretations of Old Norse saga literature, edited by Judy Quinn & Emily Lethbridge. Syddansk Universitetsforlag, Odense 2010, pp. 85–102.

 Florian Kragl: Normalmittelhochdeutsch. Theorieentwurf einer gelebten Praxis. In: Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 144 (2015), 1–27.

 Karl Stackmann: Neue Philologie? In: Modernes Mittelalter. Neue Bilder einer populären Epoche. Ed. by Joachim Heinzle. Frankfurt a. M. und Leipzig 1999, 398–427.

Notes  

Philology
Academic disciplines
Textual scholarship