Le ‘edizioni scientifiche’ di testi agiografici fra teoria e prassi

This article focuses on the main methodological issues in editing hagiographic Latin texts of the Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, whose peculiarities imply a consequent adaptation of textual criticism. The points considered are: the low literary individuality of hagiographic texts; their circulation in collections, after being written as single booklets; the ambiguous border between a simple copy of the text and its rewriting in a renewed version; problems in inventorying and classifying. The article ends with a discussion about the effectiveness of stemmatics in editing hagiographic texts.