textual criticism Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts or of printed books. Such texts may range in da ...

, an archetype is a text that originates a textual tradition. By using a stemmatic approach, the textual critic tries to trace the oldest surviving manuscript and show the relationship it has to its ancestors. This makes it possible to compare changes made in different traditions branching off from the archetype, and develop an edition that reconstructs the text of the archetype as closely as possible. An archetype should not be confused with the

autograph An autograph is a person's own handwriting or signature. The word ''autograph'' comes from Ancient Greek (, ''autós'', "self" and , ''gráphō'', "write"), and can mean more specifically: Gove, Philip B. (ed.), 1981. ''Webster's Third New Inter ...

, which is the first handwritten manuscript by an author. The archetype is also commonly mistaken to be the original text, although many would argue that it is impossible to locate an original textEpp, Eldon Jay. "The Multivalence of the Term 'Original Text' in New Testament Textual Criticism." ''The Harvard Theological Review'', vol. 92, no. 3, 1999, pp. 245–281. . within a tradition where there may not be surviving evidence, and because the author and editors may have constructed several drafts and editions throughout the process, from the moment of birth of the author's idea until the publication of an edition of the work. On the other hand, an archetype could be the original, in the sense that it is not a copy, but the concrete surviving, unmodified text.

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