Thematic Section on Studia Stemmatologica

Abstract

Stemmatology aims at gaining understanding of the development and copying history of a textual tradition, based on the surviving witnesses of the text. Typically, this includes the task of identifying for each witness the source text from which it was copied. In a textual tradition, every copyist makes alterations, errors, and corrections (that can be either correct or not), which gradually mutate the contents of the text. When the extant versions are placed in a stemma, i.e. a graph representing the copying relationships, a scholar can attempt to reconstruct the earlier textual versions by reversing the process along the branches of the stemma. Anyone who has attempted such a task is well aware of the fact that it is subject to uncertainty arising from a number of sources, and can only be done with limited precision and confidence. While having originated in textual scholarship, modern stemmatology lies at the intersection of several scientific disciplines. On one hand, it is associated with humanities where texts are used as sources and both their contents and the relationships between the individual textual witnesses are valuable as historical evidence. On the other hand, evolutionary ideas are equally present and methodologically interesting in disciplines like mathematics, statistics, computer science, and obviously, evolutionary biology and cladistics, the study of biological evolution and speciation. Academics working throughout the arts and humanities are borrowing the latest techniques employed in the sciences as tools that can help us understand the richness of human knowledge and creativity all the way from its roots, throughout the history, until our present society. In textual scholarship, the basic mechanics of reconstructing a textual tradition based on the similarities and differences of the extant textual witnesses have been known for centuries. The purpose of traditional textual criticism is most …