Publishing critically edited works (édition critique, edition critique, taḥqīq) is an arduous scientific activity with a long history, aiming to publish classical manuscripts in the closest possible form to the original text of the author by putting such manuscripts through the text criticism process. The effort of “reaching the original text” and “identifying the relations between copies” is the basis of publishing the critically edited works, which consists of stages such as identification, comparing, establishing the genealogy, and finding the differences between copies, followed by text criticism, text repair, intralingual translation, and annotation.

Even though there has been an accumulation in this field as a result of the studies carried out for more than a century in the field of critically editing the texts written in Ottoman Turkish in Turkish universities, this accumulation has not been brought together in a book format. Different disciplines and schools tried to develop a consistent system suitable for their perspectives, but a method that everyone agrees on could not be formed.

While the publication of Ottoman Turkish texts used to be limited to the fields of literature and history in the past, the increasing interest of academics from almost every discipline regarding the religious and scientific heritage of the Ottoman Empire in recent years has brought the publication of the texts related to different disciplines of the accumulation of the Ottoman sciences and thought into the spotlight.

 
Manual for Critical-Edition (For Texts in Ottoman Turkish) is a product of the “the Ottoman Turkish Critical-Edition Courses” organized by ISAM three times between 2017-2019 within the scope of the “Late Classical Period Project” and the fourth of which will be held between 20 June - 02 July 2022. It has been prepared by a committee chaired by Berat Açıl, who undertook the coordination of the above-mentioned courses. It has been prepared to guide the acquisition of all kinds of texts written in Ottoman Turkish into the world of science through critical publication, and it has been written in a style that aims to combine the different practices and methods in this field with its structuring, division, and proposals.

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