Context: The critic Joseph Bédier (1864–1938) launched a particularly withering attack on stemmatics in 1928. He surveyed editions of medieval French texts that were produced with the stemmatic method, and found that textual critics tended overwhelmingly to produce trees divided into just two branches. He concluded that this outcome was unlikely to have occurred by chance, and that therefore, the method was tending to produce bipartite stemmas regardless of the actual history of the witnesses. He suspected that editors tended to favor trees with two branches, as this would maximize the opportunities for editorial judgment (as there would be no third branch to "break the tie" whenever the witnesses disagreed). He also noted that, for many works, more than one reasonable stemma could be postulated, suggesting that the method was not as rigorous or as scientific as its proponents had claimed.

Question: What was Joseph Bédier's main criticism of the stemmatic method?
Answer: critics tended overwhelmingly to produce trees divided into just two branches.

Question: Why is a methos that only produces two branches seen as inferior?
Answer: the method was tending to produce bipartite stemmas regardless of the actual history of the witnesses.

Question: To what did Joseph Bédier attribute the prevalence of the stemmatic method?
Answer: editors tended to favor trees with two branches

Question: Why would editors only want two alternative branches when analyzing a text?
Answer: this would maximize the opportunities for editorial judgment

Question: What was the final implication of Joseph Bédier's analysis of the stemmatic method?
Answer: the method was not as rigorous or as scientific as its proponents had claimed.

Question: Why did Joseph Bédier prefer stemmatics?
Answer: Unanswerable

Question:  Why is a method that only produces two branches seen as the best?
Answer: Unanswerable

Question: Trees with two branches minimized opportunities for that? 
Answer: Unanswerable

Question: When witnesses agree, what did the third branch do?
Answer: Unanswerable

Question: Which method was more rigorous than originally claimed?
Answer: Unanswerable