What is the purpose of recension in textual criticism?

In textual criticism, the purpose of recension is to reconstruct the earliest form or forms of a text that can be inferred from all available surviving evidence.1

This process involves several key steps:

• Identification and Collation: Critics identify, date, and describe all relevant "witnesses"—including extant copies, editions, translations, and citations—and then collate them to register variant readings.1
• Analysis of Interrelationships: Critics analyze these witnesses to determine their relationships, either through a "genealogical" (stemmatic) approach, which maps the history of the text to identify an "archetype," or through a "textual" (distributional) approach, which focuses on the statistical distribution of variants.1
• Reconstruction: By evaluating this evidence, the critic aims to strip away later corruptions and errors to recover the most original state of the text possible.1

While mechanical and computational aids can assist in the collation and analysis of variants, recension remains a fundamentally scholarly task that requires critical judgment and historical understanding to navigate the complex, often unpredictable ways in which texts have been transmitted over time.21