Still, after years of regular exchanges at conferences on German editorial problems and theories and in the pages of journals of textual scholarship like editio and TEXT, there remain misunderstandings (which is unfortunate) and disagreements (which may be inevitable) between Anglo-American editors and German (and other continental) editors about certain key issues in the production of Historical-Critical Editions, or Scholarly Editions, as they are known to Anglo-American scholars. In general terms the misunderstandings and disagreements seem to focus on the goals of scholarly editing and the concepts of authorization. At the core of the difficulty is, I believe, the distinction between the textual artifact and what Gunter Martens has called the “aesthetic object” – between physical documents and the art that they witness or represent. This distinction was discussed briefly in the previous chapter; here it forms a background to explorations of other distinctions leading to disagreements over theory and practice in scholarly editing.