Edition as Communication: David Wilkins’s 3 Corinthians in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters

Abstract Riffing on the “radical philology” of Sean Gurd, this article challenges generalized accounts of the edition, and its entanglement in ideologies of print culture, as an object of representation that fixes the text, by analyzing the editio princeps of 3 Corinthians in its intellectual and technological context of production. As this article documents the controversy and new editions prompted by Wilkins’s pamphlet, it argues that the ensuing textual multiplicity exemplifies key characteristics of the early-eighteenth-century Republic of Letters identified by Paul Dibon, Anne Goldgar, and others: a concern for communication, not only of new content but the manner in which that communication occurred. Rather than seeing the print edition as a fixing or stabilizing of text, this article shows how textual multiplicity is achieved through the edition’s performance of communication.