More Guest Lectures on TC

We’ve uploaded two more videos to our TCI YouTube channel from my ThM TC course. You can find all the guest lecture videos here (not all are recorded).

The first new video is from Joey McCollum on identifying textual clusters and is based on his recent AUSS article on the same topic. The second is by Clark Bates on the origin of Greek minuscule. Clark is soon headed off to Birmingham and we wish him and his family well, especially as they adjust to life with no sun and temps below 110°F. Thanks to both for sharing their research with us.

Joey McCollum

Clark Bates

New Open Access Handbook of Stemmatology

De Gruyter has just published a major new handbook on stemmatology, i.e., the study of textual relations. The full title is Handbook of Stemmatology: History, Methodology, Digital Approaches. I sampled a few chapters over the weekend and I am looking forward to reading further. The format recalls another major open access introduction, Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction. Like that volume, this one is organized by subject areas that each have their own subeditor and contributors. Many of the names I recognize as leaders in the field. As with most handbooks, the goal is not to break new ground so much as to give the lay of the land. 

Here is the publisher’s description:

Stemmatology studies aspects of textual criticism that use genealogical methods to analyse a set of copies of a text whose autograph has been lost. This handbook is the first to cover the entire field, encompassing both theoretical and practical aspects of traditional as well as modern digital methods and their history. As an art (ars), stemmatology’s main goal is editing and thus presenting to the reader a historical text in the most satisfactory way. As a more abstract discipline (scientia), it is interested in the general principles of how texts change in the process of being copied. Thirty eight experts from all of the fields involved have joined forces to write this handbook, whose eight chapters cover material aspects of text traditions, the genesis and methods of traditional “Lachmannian” textual criticism and the objections raised against it, as well as modern digital methods used in the field. The two concluding chapters take a closer look at how this approach towards texts and textual criticism has developed in some disciplines of textual scholarship and compare methods used in other fields that deal with “descent with modification”. The handbook thus serves as an introduction to this interdisciplinary field.

– First systematic coverage of stemmatology as a field within textual criticism.
– Written by 38 experts in fields from various philologies to biology and information theory.
– Illustrations and many practical examples from a wide range of disciplines are provided to render the content more accessible.

H/T: Georgi Parpulov 

ETC Interview with Paolo Trovato: Part 2

Here is Part 2 of my interview with Paolo Trovato. Read Part 1 here.

For someone who isn’t an editor or working on an edition of a text, what do think is the main value of your book for them?

Being able to easily detect the typos in a newspaper or a brand-new book. I am not kidding. This means realizing that, even in our time, any work hides or can hide within its pages a number of textual problems, born during the transmission, that is, the journey of the text from the author (via printing house or Xerox copies or internet) to the reader.

Can you tell us what you are working on at the moment?

Well, it is a rather long “moment”. Since 2007 I am working with a small team on a critical edition of Dante’s Commedia. The classification of the 600 extant MSS not reduced to small fragments took almost ten years, but now, thank God, we find ourselves in the more amusing and creative phase of fixing the text, for which we use 12 MSS only, the highest and most conservative in our stemma. In these very days I am working on Inferno, IV, but I already published provisional editions of Inferno, XXIII and Inferno, XXXIV on the web where I am getting precious feedback (see here and here). I have also completed some other cantos.

An Online Lexicon of Stemmatology

Typically, Biblical textual critics have not paid much attention to stemmatics—the study of relational trees—for the simple reason that these methods have never worked for the Old or New Testament on any sizable scale. But that is beginning to change as computers have brought with them new attempts to address the longstanding problem of contamination.

The problem is that the world of stemmatology can be hard to break into because of its technical nature. I certainly had difficulty with it when I started working on the CBGM.

So today I was happy to come across the Parvum lexicon stemmatologicum (PLS) which bills itself as “a scholarly digital resource providing explanations for technical terms related to stemmatology, a discipline of classical and mediaeval philology aiming at understanding the historical evolution of textual traditions.”

The editors are experts in the field and the entries I have looked at are reliable and helpful. To give you a flavor, here is the entry on “autograph”:

The word is derived from the Greek adjective αὐτόγραφος ‘written with one’s own hand’. In manuscript studies, an autograph is a witness written by the author himself. For texts from antiquity and the middle ages it is very rare that such autographs are today still extant (examples in Chiesa 1994). For scholars of stemmatology, matters become more complicated if the author revised the autograph, sometimes repeatedly. Copyists may copy revised and unrevised text or choose between the two, which may lead to a situation of having an archetype containing variants in some places. An example of an extant mediaeval autograph is the work Periphyseon by 9th century author John Scotus Eriugena (cf. Jeauneau & Dutton 1996) in Reims, Bibliothèque Municipale, 875. This manuscript is written in several hands, at least one of which seems to be the author’s. In case the author wrote only one autograph and it is extant, it is equivalent to the text’s archetype.

References
– Jeauneau, Edouard, and Paul Edward Dutton. 1996. The autograph of Eriugena. Turnhout: Brepols.
– Chiesa, Paolo, and Lucia Pinelli, eds. 1994. Gli autografi medievali: Problemi paleografici e filologici. Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo (CISAM)

New Essays on Stemmatics in DSH

The latest issue of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (31.3) has a special section of stemmatics. I would particularly recommend the essays by Barbara Bordalejo and Peter Robinson which were mentioned on the blog here. All of these appear to be freely available for the time being. But I don’t think that will last. Here’s the list of essays:

Thematic Section on Studia Stemmatologica

• Thematic Section on Studia Stemmatologica
  Tuomas Heikkilä, Teemu Roos
• Analysis of variation significance in artificial traditions using Stemmaweb
  Tara L. Andrews
• Lines of succession in an English ballad tradition: The publishing history and textual descent of The Wandering Jew’s Chronicle
  Giles Bergel, Christopher J. Howe, Heather F. Windram
• The genealogy of texts: Manuscript traditions and textual traditions
  Barbara Bordalejo
• Computer-assisted stemmatology in studying Paulus Juusten’s 16th-century chronicle Catalogus et ordinaria successio Episcoporum Finlandensium
  Marko Halonen
• The silva portentosa of stemmatology: Bifurcation in the recension of Old Norse manuscripts
  Odd Einar Haugen
• Oral fairy tale or literary fake? Investigating the origins of Little Red Riding Hood using phylogenetic network analysis
  Jamshid Tehrani, Quan Nguyen, Teemu Roos
• Four rules for the application of phylogenetics in the analysis of textual traditions
  Peter Robinson
• Open versus closed recensions (Pasquali): Pros and cons of some methods for computer-assisted stemmatology
  Marina Buzzoni, Eugenio Burgio, Martina Modena, Samuela Simion

What Are Text-Types For?

In his book Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique (1973), Martin West raises an important issue for the use of text-types in NT textual criticism. 

Here is West:

When the critic has established that no stemma can be constructed, how is he to proceed? He must, of course, see what groupings are apparent among the manuscripts, and whether the individual groups can be analysed stemmatically… (p. 42).

Here we should pause and note that, as Colwell noted in his essay on the genealogical method, this is exactly what Westcott and Hort did in rejecting the “Syrian” text. They applied stemmatic principles, not to individual manuscripts, but to groups. Having done this, they were able to exclude the Syrian text from consideration on the principle that it was purely derivative. We might call this principle eliminatio textuum descriptorum.

Westcott and Hort’s stemma has since been modified and the results have not usually been treated with such stemmatic rigor. But West goes on to explain how such groupings can still be useful to the critic:

…even if they [groups] cannot [be analysed stemmatically], he can treat them as units in his further cogitations, provided that they have a sharply defined identity. Thus he reduces his problem to its basic terms.

This reduction of the problem is a major reason why text-types have been so valuable in NT textual studies. Where you have four manuscripts in a tradition, you don’t need to reduce the material. But for the NT such reduction is a huge benefit, even a necessity. No one can keep dozens let alone hundreds of manuscript relations in their head and then apply them to specific variations. But three or four relationships is no trouble at all. Hence the value and appeal of text-types. They “reduce” the problem.

But note the key qualification in West’s sentence. The critic can treat groups as units in his further cogitations, provided that they have a sharply defined identity.

If this is true, then it would seem that the use of text-types in our text critical “cogitations” is in trouble since no such definition exists. Even Eldon Epp in his excellent essay on “textual clusters” says that “the tricky issue, of course, is determining, in percentage terms [West’s ‘sharply defined identity’], what extent of agreement in readings joins members into a group, and what degree of separation in agreements determines the existence of a separate group” (“Textual Clusters: Their Past and Future,” [2013], p. 571). 

Unfortunately Epp doesn’t have an answer to this “tricky issue” which makes me wonder if our failing effort to define text-types is an indication that we’re trying to solve the wrong problem. Maybe trying to reduce the problem is our problem and we should start looking for ways to use more manuscripts (not less) in studying the history of the text.

How (Not) to Use a Computer-Generated Stemma

Barbara Bordalejo has been heavily involved in the use of computer-aided stemmatics since at least the time of her NYU doctoral thesis (2003; found here).

In the newest issue of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities she has an important essay on how to understand the differences (and similarities) between the genealogy of texts and the genealogy of manuscripts—a distinction central to the CBGM. 

Put another way, this is an article on how to avoid misusing computer-generated genealogies. Since this is a concern that comes up again and again when I talk to people about the CBGM, I thought it would be worth quoting Bordalejo’s conclusion in full:

Phylogenetic analysis and other computer-assisted stemmatological approaches can be used productively when studying large textual traditions, despite the difficulties presented by contamination, changes in order, major alterations, and significant losses. The stemmata produced using computer-assisted methods are working hypotheses which serve as a starting point of investigation. These stemmata, whether they correspond to a textual tradition or a manuscript tradition, are one of the tools that we can use to further our understanding of how texts are transmitted and how variants are inherited. What they do not do is to present us with a one size-fits-all solution that could answer all of our queries. In the end, we are still subject to the remarks of A. E. Housman who said that knowledge and method were important, but that besides those a scholar was required to make use of her brain (Housman, 1921).

The interpretation of the stemmata generated by the use of phylogenetic software is fundamentally changed when we understand the difference between textual and manuscript traditions. Although the search for meaning in each of these follows a similar pattern, the recognition of the differences between the data sets will have an impact on our expectations.

A stemma, computer-generated or made by hand, is only a graphic representation of a hypothesis (machine or human or a combination of both) created following a specific model and has to be treated as such. The historical reality that underlies our hypotheses cannot be recovered in its totality, whether this reality corresponds with the textual tradition or with the manuscript tradition. However, combining computer-assisted stemmatic analysis, database searches and historical knowledge of the production history of a particular text can help us build increasingly convincing hypotheses about it. Once we recognize this, we will be better equipped to use the tools at our disposal more efficiently and interpret the results of our research more accurately.*

Notice that Bordalejo is saying that regardless of whether we are after manuscript relations or textual relations, our stemmata are only partial representations of the historical reality. This is important because some of the literature on classical manuscript stemmatics can leave one with the impression that what they provide is a complete history. But this is not the case (cf. M. West, Textual Criticism, p. 35 and P. Trovato, Lachmann’s Method, p. 144 [quoted here]).

It’s also worth noting that Bordalejo does not set textual relations against manuscript relations but considers them to be mutually informing. The bulk of her essay helps us think through how they can be used in this way. But for that, you’ll have to read the full article (it’s it was free).

*Barbara Bordalejo, “The Genealogy of Texts: Manuscript Traditions and Textual Traditions” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 30.4 (2015): 1–15 (12–13); italics mine.

Update

I see that Peter Robinson also has an essay out in DSH which comes to many of the same conclusions. For example: “In our reconstructions, we are making a wager about history, not a statement of fact.... These strictures still leave substantial space where quantitative methods can, in combination with traditional scholarly methods and knowledge, achieve valuable results.” He goes on to cite the example of Prue Shaw’s work on Dante. His article is “Four Rules for the Application of Phylogenetics in the Analysis of Textual Traditions“ (not free).

Paolo Trovato’s New Book on Lachmann’s Method

A new book came out last October that I think deserves the attention of NT text critics, especially those working on all things stemmatic. It’s written by Paolo Trovato, a prolific Italian philologist (the same Trovato putting on the summer school).

The book is Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann’s Method: A Non-Standard Handbook of Genealogical Textual Criticism in the Age of Post-Structuralism, Cladistics, and Copy-Text (Padova: libreriauniversitaria.it , 2014).

This is now, in my opinion, by far the best book on Lachmannian stemmatics and should supercede Paul Maas as the first place to turn to understand this classic method of textual criticism. Trovato has done English readers a special service by making a point to include translated quotations from Italian textual critics. This is valuable material that is otherwise inaccessible to students who don’t read Italian. (That said, the French is generally untranslated.) This alone made it worth the price for me. Although focused on classical and medieval works (only Paul Wegner’s Student’s Guide and Epp’s article on classification get a mention for Biblical textual criticism), there is much here by way of principle to benefit any textual critic. Written with verve but also with a thorough knowledge of the subject, it should serve beginning students and seasoned scholars admirably.

You can read the first 30 pages here.

Here is a taste of what caught my attention as I read it:

Carlson's "The Text of Galatians and Its History"

Stephen Carlson’s dissertation, “The Text of Galatians and Its History,” is now available at Duke Space here.

Abstract:

This dissertation investigates the text of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians and its history, how it changed over time. This dissertation performs a stemmatic analysis of 92 witnesses to the text of Galatians, using cladistic methods developed by computational biologists, to construct an unoriented stemma of the textual tradition. The stemma is then oriented based on the internal evidence of textual variants. After the stemma is oriented, the textual variants near the base of the stemma are examined and the text of Galatians is established based on stemmatic and eclectic principles. In addition, two branches of the textual tradition, the Western and the Eastern-Byzantine, are studied to assess the nature of textual variation in their history. This study reaches the conclusion that a modified stemmatic approach is an effective way to study both the text of a New Testament book and its history.