. . . . "Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of transcription errors in texts, both manuscripts and printed books. Ancient scribes made alterations when copying manuscripts by hand.Given a manuscript copy, several or many copies, but not the original document, the textual critic might seek to reconstruct the original text (the archetype or autograph) as closely as possible."@en . .