Recension is the practice of editing or revising a text based on critical analysis. When referring to manuscript

Manuscript

A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...

s, this may be a revision by another author. The term is derived from Latin recensio "review, analysis".

In textual criticism

Textual criticism

Textual criticism is a branch of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in the texts of manuscripts...

, particularly Biblical scholarship, the count noun

Count noun

In linguistics, a count noun is a common noun that can be modified by a numeral and that occurs in both singular and plural form, as well as co-occurring with quantificational determiners like every, each, several, etc. A mass noun has none of these properties...

 "recension" may be used to refer to a family of manuscript

Manuscript

A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...

s sharing similar traits; for example, the Alexandrian text-type

Alexandrian text-type

The Alexandrian text-type , associated with Alexandria, is one of several text-types used in New Testament textual criticism to describe and group the textual character of biblical manuscripts...

 may be referred to as the "Alexandrian recension". The term "recension" may also refer to the process of collecting and analyzing source texts in order to establish a tree structure leading backward to a hypothetical original text.

See also

• Biblical manuscript
  Biblical manuscript
  A biblical manuscript is any handwritten copy of a portion of the text of the Bible. The word Bible comes from the Greek biblia ; manuscript comes from Latin manu and scriptum...
  
  
• Categories of New Testament manuscripts
  Categories of New Testament manuscripts
  New Testament manuscripts in Greek are categorized into five groups, according to a scheme introduced in 1981 by Kurt and Barbara Aland in Der Text des Neuen Testaments. The categories are based on how each manuscript relates to the various text-types. Generally speaking, earlier Alexandrian...
  
  
• Critical apparatus
  Critical apparatus
  The critical apparatus is the critical and primary source material that accompanies an edition of a text. A critical apparatus is often a by-product of textual criticism....
  
  
• Torah redactor