Some short remarks on the edition of medieval Slavonic texts

This paper reflects upon the issue of preparing critical editions of medieval Church Slavonic texts. As it is well known, these are characterized by a complex textual and linguistic tradition, varying both in time and space; this makes a text reconstruction, based on the philological standards of classical philology, an extremely difficult and somehow useless task. However, one should not totally dispense with conjectural critique, as the main task of an edition is to make the text readable and understandable. Moreover, one should not neglect the fact that the vast majority of Slavonic texts represents translation literature; this fact requires further efforts with regard to the proper identification of the source and, above all, to the frequent perturbations in the textual transmission of the Slavonic translation. Some concrete examples are here provided and discussed.