What does it mean to canonize a text?

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What does it mean to canonize a text?

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

To make it official. Besides for religion, it’s also used in popular culture: a book is considered more cannon than a movie, and fanfiction is even less cannon than that.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It is a term borrowed from Theology. To canonize a text is to render said text as being significant at defining something, and the standard by which something is determined as belonging to what it is defining. So for religions it is their holy texts, but for secular things it would be other stuff. So with Star Wars, for example, canon is what has been put on film, and whatever books/tv shows/video games Disney says are canon. Everything else is non-canon and so while it can be an entertaining story it did not officially happen in the Star Wars universe.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In basic terms, put it on a list with all the other things that you think are significant enough in some way to either be remembered, be a standard, an example of culture, etc.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The idea comes from Christianity and especially Catholicism.

When people first started to write down what is now the bible they had to decide which books to include and which not.

There were a ton of other gospels and other texts around and the leaders of the time had to decide which they wanted to be part of their holy text and which not.

As you can imagine this was a process not without arguments. Various groups had different ideas about which prophets, psalms, gospels and letters to include.

When the Catholic church became a distinct thing they set down a “rule” about which parts were officially part of their bible.

That was the biblical Canon.

Anything that was not part of the canon was apocryphal.

Over time people came to use this idea as a metaphor to describe essential text on a subject as canonical when everyone agreed that they should be read by anyone who studied the matter at hand.

In more recent times it has become used to describe works of fiction. Especially shared worlds written by many different creators that and lots of fans arguing about it have taken up the idea that certain works form the core part of the story and others may feature the same characters and settings but are not “true” for the rest of the fictional world.

When you canonize a text you declare it to be part of your holy book, or metaphorically to be part of the essential reading on a subject or official part of the backstory of a fictional world.

People can get very worked up about question such as if Jesus childhood adventures are canon vs the Gospel of Judas or if the Star Trek Technical manual is canon vs the Star Trek Animated series, so it is best to stay out of such discussions.