The printing press and standardization

Something I've become increasingly sensitive to this year (as my roommate/chevrusa can attest to) is text criticism. I've blogged about my frustration with it before, but I've also gained a certain appreciation for its importance to scholarship of all kinds. One interesting fact about Jewish intellectual history that this increased sensitivity has made me aware of is the effect of the printing press on the traditional Jewish view of text scholarship. In medieval works, the fact that there are differing manuscript traditions is taken for granted. Israel Ta-shema, in his book The Exegetical Literature on the Talmud, goes through a list of things that every Talmudic exegete goes through for every comment he makes. The first is determining that he has the proper text. My experience with medieval scholarship backs this up. There are sometimes debates about what that text is, and it is clear that nobody automatically assumed that any given manuscript was correct. They took it for granted that errors were made in the transmissions of texts. Since the advent of the printing press, we take it for granted that there are no errors in our text, unless noted by any earlier authority, to the point where any suggestion of change borders on heresy. There was a big hubbub when the Steinsaltz edition of the Talmud came out, because he did not include the standard printed version. This edition was first printed at the end of the 19th century, but it has almost reached canonical status among Orthodox Jews. The same goes for standard printings of other texts. We operate off the unconscious assumption that we are reading authoritative texts, which sometimes creates situations where texts are difficult to read properly, or where we misunderstand them entirely. It certainly gives us a completely different view of texts than the medievals had, and not for the better, I think. It's interesting to me that the printing press, one of the most, probably the most, important factors in the development of the modern world, is an important factor in this regressive stream of though in Orthodox Judaism.