How to address text corruption cases in a reader-friendly codex edition?

The case of Apor Codex

Abstract

Codex editions aimed at professionals contain literal transcriptions of manuscripts, and it is not their task to illuminate issues regarding interpretation. By contrast, a ‘reader-friendly edition’ is specifically designed to allow today’s readers to comprehend an old text, firstly by publishing it in modern orthographic transcription and secondly by offering various kinds of supplementary information (dictionary, grammar overview in the introduction, footnotes, etc.).
Apor Codex (15th c.), which is the oldest surviving Hungarian Book of Psalms as part of the so-called Hussite Bible, contains a striking number of errors, which suggests that it is a copy of a copy, far removed from the original. Throughout preparing the reader-friendly edition, our key concern was to see how particular error types affected the meaning of the text. Copy errors were assigned into three groups: a) the result was a nonsense word, b) the result was a meaningful word that did not fit into its context, c) the result was a meaningful word that was also appropriate in its
context but it did not match either the original text or parallel sources. These types required different treatments, and in the talk, I present several examples to illustrate procedures developed for them. In the first two cases (whenever the correct form was safely reconstructed), the error was corrected in the text itself, without separate commentary. However, when the error resulted in a comprehensible sentence whose meaning departed from the original, this sentence was reproduced in the text and problems of interpretation were discussed in the footnotes.
The study is based on the following edition. Apor-kódex, Ómagyar zsoltárok, közreadja Korompay
Klára [Apor Codex. Old Hungarian psalms, issued by Klára Korompay], Budapest, Balassi, 2021.