The concentration on two sixteenth-century critics has one notable consequence of the terminology used in this study. In present-day textual criticism, the term ’emendation’ is often used as denoting only ‘conjectural emendation’. In the sixteenth century, however, ’emendation’ was not necessarily ‘conjectural’, but simply meant the correct of a vulgate text or the editio princeps. Critics emended, improved a previous edition with respect to details. This situation remained during the period of the dominance of the Textus Receptus. In this period, emendations, the adoption of alternative readings, was done in two distinct ways, depending on the way these readings were found: they could either be derived from manuscripts or be arrived at by rational argument. Hence a distinction was made between emendatio codicum ope (’emendation by means of manuscripts’) and emendatio ingenii ope (’emendation by means of reasoning’). For the Greek text of Erasmus’ New Testament edition, for instance, the typesetters used manuscripts which had been emended by Erasmus for the most part by means of a few other manuscripts.

Jan Krans, Beyond What Is Written: Erasmus and Beza as Conjectural Critics of the New Testament, 4-5.

In the present study, however, the term ‘conjectural emendation’ is used consistently to reflect the distinction between emendatio codicum ope and emendatio ingenii ope as current before the nineteenth century. It should finally be noted that most conjectures discussed in this study were never printed as part of a Greek New Testament. They have their Sitz-im-Leben in annotations and commentaries. Indeed, a recurrent theme of this study is the tendency of Erasmus and Beza to propose conjectures without actually implementing them.

Jan Krans, Beyond What Is Written: Erasmus and Beza as Conjectural Critics of the New Testament, 5.