Paolo Trovato has alerted me to an interesting article just published in the latest Storie e linguaggi by one of his doctoral students, Federico Marchetti. The article grows out of his doctoral work and considers manuscripts of Dante that have known exemplars (Abschriften in NTTC terms). In the course of studying these, he addresses the use of singular readings as a way of determining scribal habits. This method has had its critics over the years (e.g., Strutwolf, Jongkind, myself, and now Hixson). Marchetti also criticizes it given his own results because it includes false data. Here is his conclusion:If Po [the exemplar] had been lost, and if we had decided to investigate the scribal behaviour of Est [the copy] according to the Colwell method (that is, by calculating the percentage of textual agreement with the rest of the surviving manuscript tradition), we would necessarily have considered the scribe of Est responsible both for his own errors (which affect 0,06% of the verses) and for those that are ascribable to earlier stages of the tradition (which affect 17,6% of the verses). It is evident that such a diversity in approaches leads to a dramatic discrepancy in outcomes and their degree of reliability. Applying the Colwell method, we would certainly talk about a “scribal version” or “scribal revision” in this case, but – as we have just seen – the copyist of Est is in fact a very diligent scribe, careful about the formal features of his model as well as about its substance. In conclusion, the data collected bear out the necessity of making use of the genealogical-reconstructive method; more in general, they advocate the validity of the Neo-Lachmannian approach.What I didn’t see in Marchetti’s article is a recognition that Royse, for example, fully recognizes this limitation or that Royse incorporates these false positives under his rubric of “the complex scribe.” But, as I have argued in my own work, the problem of deducing scribal habits from singular readings can’t simply be solved by appeal to the complex scribe since most scribally-created readings are not singular at all. I suspect part of the issue here for Marchetti is that he is after a different goal than determining principles of transcriptional probability (Colwell’s main goal). The NT, of course, is highly contaminated which is why Lachmannian approaches, whether neo- or not, have generally not been used.
In any case, my thanks to Paulo for alerting me to this essay. The entire issue will be of interest to our readers and can be found online here with abstracts.
PG,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the ‘heads up’. As I was reading your post, my initial response was that a presumption in singular readings is that some may have been in the exemplar. I don’t see how this invalidates either Colwell or Royse since both seemed to be aware of this.
I, for one, continue to be interested in a Neo-Lachmannin approach to the N.T.. It seems like Dr. Travato may not believe it is impossible because of corruption based on his previous comments.
Tim
TJ. Of course I think that fresh tests of a “Neo-Lachmannian approach" to NT could be of great interest. I am also glad to share the opinion that NT is “highly contaminated” (I add that, as a rule, contamination increases as time passes). But I don’t understand the hint to “corruption” which is commonplace in any textual history (PT)
DeleteThe link goes to the wrong year/issue, and the latest issue is not up yet.
ReplyDeleteAssuming the quoted conclusion is representative of the article, it appears that Royse already anticipated the objection. (Of course, there are other objections to the singular reading approach.)
the link to the latest issue is https://www.libreriauniversitaria.it/storie-linguaggi-2019-1/rivista/24217344/2019/1/storie-linguaggi-2019-1.htm
DeleteLinks are fixed. Thanks.
DeleteI was a bit amused by one article's claim that I 'disregarded' genealogical methods and, instead, adopted 'heterodox' ones (such as critically summarising the results of TuT in my *summary of the history of research* or studying the codicology and physical features of the MS, which was in any case the primary focus of the work).
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DeleteDear PG,
ReplyDeletefirst of all, I would like to thank you for mentioning our article in this renowned website. I am aware of the numerous criticisms moved to the Colwell method; I discussed some of them in my PhD thesis (particularly focusing on your and Jongkind’s observations), and I will discuss them more in depth in my forthcoming monograph («‘Scribal behaviour’ and ‘scribal habits’: a methodological problem. Towards a phenomenology of codices descripti»). In this regard, I would also like to mention the remarkable research carried out by Alan Taylor Farnes («Scribal Habits in Selected New Testament Manuscripts, Including Those with Surviving Exemplars»), who proposes a comparison between his “Abschriften method” and the one employed by James Royse.
As the title suggests, the main aim of my essay is to anticipate some preliminary data concerning my study of codices descripti in Dante’s Comedy manuscript tradition. As I have written, my ultimate goal is to provide a diagnostic tool for determining if a codex under examination is a descriptus, while investigating the average skills of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century scribes. In this perspective, I thought it could be useful to briefly present the most commonly used methods for the investigation of scribal habits and scribal patterns, many of which position themselves very far from Neolachmannian philology. I tried to evaluate whether these methods could offer more reliable outcomes compared to the study of Abschriften, or if they showed critical points.
[continues...]
For what concerns the Colwell method, I am well aware of the observations moved by Royse; yet, I am not sure the “complex scribe” criterion efficiently exhausts all the contradictions. Despite its aim being to evaluate «the readings of the manuscripts studied» and to detect “scribally created readings”, I believe that the results produced by the Colwell method nonetheless lack an adequate scientific background. Royse introduces the complex scribes with respect to “isolated traditions”. Firstly, he considers a manuscript tradition comprised of three witnesses: A (the Abschrift), B (its lost ancestor) and x (B’s lost ancestor, which has left its influence on other extant manuscripts). Thus, in this case, the tradition would be isolated only at B–A, and the “scribe of A” would be a complex of two scribes. He then takes a simple example: «suppose that both the scribe of A and the scribe of B make an average of one omission by homoeoteleuton per page of Nestle-Aland, and that the scribe of another manuscript x, which is not the outcome of such an isolated tradition, makes such errors with the same frequency. Some of these omissions will not be singular, of course, but let us presume that the frequencies of singular omissions by homoeoteleuton made by the three scribes are also (more or less) the same. Thus, manuscript A will have twice as many singular omissions by homoeoteleuton as manuscript x, and so we will, in forming the profiles, judge that the scribe of A is twice as prone to omission by homoeoteleuton as is the scribe of x». First of all, without having both the Vorlage and the Abschrift available, it is not possible to infer how long the “isolated tradition” chain is: for example, there could have been many intermediary manuscripts (codices interpositi) between B and A, which got lost due to the high decimation rate. Therefore, it is logically impossible to distinguish a priori between a «two-person process» and, let us say, a ten-person process. Given the impossibility to determine how many stages singular readings went through before appearing in manuscript A, it is impossible – for us – to use this method for proficiently evaluating scribal habits. I am not sure that – as Royse explains – «isolation is highly unlikely for many steps because of textual contamination»; nor do I think that we can «appeal to Ockham’s razor, and decline to multiply scribes beyond necessity». Moreover, even if Royse cleverly points out some weaknesses in the Colwell method, still he does use it himself, considering that the presence of a “complex scribe” «seemed too unlikely for [his] six papyri to warrant our continually burdening our terminology with explicit references to it».
DeleteOn the other hand, I combine Maas' criteria of conjunctive and separative errors with the prescriptions of Timpanaro and Reeve concerning the need of codicological evidence; in this way, the relation of dependence between A and B can be proven with reasonable certainty. The outcome of this rather time-consuming research is a considerable amount of objective information on the behaviour of the Abschrift’s scribe.
Kindest regards,
Federico Marchetti
Federico, thanks for your comments. I think I agree with much of what you’ve said. As you know from my dissertation, I have my own critiques of the singular readings approach to determining transcriptional probabilities. In my opinion, singular readings do reliably give us readings that are the result of scribes rather than authors. And that is largely what NT textual critics are after in using them. Their problem is that they only give us some scribal readings and not the majority of them. And that can lead to skewed picture of scribal tendencies. But we’ll look forward to the publication of your full dissertation. Please do let me know when it comes out. Thanks!
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