Anche quando è possibile dimostrare obiettivamente, per via di varianti, che una famiglia sia migliore di un'altra, ossia contenga meno corruttele, ciò non ha pratica utilità a risolvere i problemi posti dal singolo passo in cui esse divergono. Qui possono valere soltanto i noti criteri interni; campo nel quale, quanto più dall'antichità ci si addentra nel medioevo, si ha a disposizione uno strumento di verifica che in generale il filologo classico non ha: le fonti dell'autore. Il caso più ovvio è rappresentato dalle traduzioni. In innumerevoli passi l'editore ha potuto decidere a favore dell'una o dell'altra classe di mss. della versione latina di Giuseppe Flavio […] tenendo d'occhio l'originale greco […]. *A fortiori* il criterio è valido per l'emendatio […]. La scoperta di una fonte – specialmente di un modello d'imitazione letteraria, come ci ha insegnato in analoghi casi il Mariotti – serve proprio a correggere il testo. Cio è stato fatto da Dag Norberg per la *Vita ritmica* di s. Zeno, emendata appunto sulla base dell'opera prosastica di cui pare rielaborazione […] e per talune poesie di Paolino di Aquileia, mediante il confronto con passi di poeti cristiani antichi cui il carolingio si era rifatto […]. La ricerca delle fonti ha quindi fondamentale importanza anche per la critica testuale, e per tanti autori resta ancora in buona parte da fare. Talora, anzi, la lezione della fonte può funzionare come "terzo ramo" di uno stemma altrimenti bifido e "chiudere" una *recensio* per sé aperta. (Orlandi 1981, 336 = 2008, 7–8)

[Even when it is possible to demonstrate objectively, by means of readings, that one family is better than another, that is to say, contains fewer errors, this is not of practical use for solving the problems posed by a given passage in which they diverge. Only known internal criteria can apply here; this is a field in which, as one moves from Antiquity and enters the Middle Ages, one acquires a verification tool that, in general, the classical philologist does not have: the sources of the author. The most obvious case is represented by translations. In countless places, the editor was able to decide in favour of one or the other family of manuscripts of the Latin version of Josephus […] by keeping an eye on the original Greek […]. *A fortiori* the criterion is valid for *emendatio* […]. The discovery of a source – especially of a model of literary imitation, as Mariotti has taught us in similar cases – serves precisely to correct the text. This has been done by Dag Norberg for the rhythmic life of St Zeno, corrected precisely on the basis of the prose work which seems to have been reworked […], and for certain poems by Paulinus of Aquileia corrected by means of comparison with passages from ancient Christian poets whom the Carolingian poet had reworked […]. The study of sources is therefore of fundamental importance also for textual criticism, and for many authors still remains to be done. Sometimes, the reading of the source can function also as the "third branch" of an otherwise twobranched stemma and "close" a *recensio* that appeared per se to be "open".]

See also Brambilla Ageno (1986), Maggioni (1994), Orlandi (1995, 4 = 2008, 100), and Del Popolo (2001). This method has been fruitfully applied to the edition of Old Norse sagas by Bullitta (2017), who systematically compared the witnesses of *Niðrstigningar saga* using the Latin source text underlying the work.

### **1982–: Deepening of the concept of the archetype (Weitzman, Reeve, Guidi and Trovato)**

The genealogical concept of the a r chetype introduced and used by Lachmann and some of his contemporaries was, and still can be, rather difficult to handle because the new technical meaning of the term (a lost manuscript on which the extant transmission depends) overlaps with the classical and humanistic meaning of the word (an "official text" checked by the author and intended to be published afterwards in further copies), thus causing ambiguity or misconceptions. Reeve observes: "Since the Renaissance, when scholars at work on the text of Greek and Latin authors took it [*archetypus*] up, the classical term […] has been used in so many senses that no-one today can safely use it without defining it" (1985, 193 = 2011a, 107).

Thus, even highly experienced scholars appear not to have broken completely free of the classical meaning of the term "archetype", failing to view the archetype as a manuscript whose existence is "by chance" detected by philologists within the stemma, and treating it instead as an especially authoritative exemplar or as the result of a sudden and inexplicable bottleneck in the ancient and mediaeval tradition whereby only one copy survived. To provide just one example of this line of reasoning, even the very competent Pasquali notes: "A chi ben consideri deve sembrare inverosimile che ogni volta di ciascun'opera tuttora superstite si fosse salvato nel Medioevo (occidentale e bizantino) un solo esemplare, mentre tutti gli altri erano andati a fondo con la caduta della civiltà antica" (Pasquali 1934, 15) [On careful consideration, it must appear unlikely that, each time, only one exemplar of each surviving work had been saved in the Middle Ages, whether Western or Byzantine, while all the others had perished with the fall of ancient civilisation].

The studies on two-branched stemmata and the loss of manuscripts by Weitzman (1982, 1987) and Guidi and Trovato (2004) allow us to explain the concept in a different and very simple way. As I have already pointed out,

tracing a tradition back to an archetype dating, say, from the fourth century, does not at all mean that "in antiquity" (or in the Middle Ages, or in the early modern period) a single witness of our text was preserved, or a single copy that was authoritative for one reason or another. What it means is that the witnesses available today do not allow modern philologists to trace their way any further back than a given manuscript (usually lost), often far removed from the original, and sometimes datable with fairly reasonable approximation. […] In Latin and Greek classics, the archetype is often from the age of Charlemagne, so what has disappeared is not just the first four or five generations of witnesses, but – with very rare exceptions – the whole manuscript tradition preceding the ninth or tenth century AD. (Trovato 2017, 66)

The following diagrams from Weitzman (1982) can help to explain how a copy can become the archetype, for they depict different phases of a simulated manuscript tradition. In Weitzman's own words:

Omega represents the lost original. All manuscripts alive at the stated time are shown, without any ring, except that four codices descripti in the final population ("sons" of 61 and 95, another "son" of 95 and its own "son") are omitted. Manuscripts fully ringed are dead; many other dead manuscripts are omitted. A dotted ring indicates a dying manuscript. (Weitzman 1982, 59)

As noted above, the four diagrams in figure 2.4-2 depict four different phases of a manuscript tradition. It is easy to understand that, if today we could work with the witnesses extant in 1287, our knowledge of the archetype, that is "13", would be more sound than that obtained by working with the witnesses found in the final

**Fig. 2.4-2:** Diagrams from Weitzman (1982, 59). The diagrams represent four phases of one of the artificial transmissions produced by means of software. I have corrected the last figure ("End of process") as per Weitzman (1987, 289).

diagram because we would still have three lines of descent from it. At the end of the process, in 1500, one of these lines is completely extinct, so we would be in trouble whenever the two surviving branches differ. What if we imagine that, both in 1287 and at the end of the process, due to a severe loss rate, only some copies that depend on "32" had survived? It is readily apparent that in this case the archetype that textual scholars could reconstruct would be "32" and not "13". Therefore,

the archetype of the stemma has nothing to do with the history of the tradition (official copies, if any; copies commissioned for circulation by the author himself, etc.), but only with the ensemble of manuscripts that happen to be available today, used by the philologist in the stage of *recensio*. Textual critics should only use the word *archetype* to designate the point in the stemma beyond which the surviving tradition does not allow them to reach. (Trovato 2017, 66)

The concept of the archetype is further discussed in sections 4.1 and 4.2 below. In order to analyse in depth this recent process of clarification of the notion, the reader can consult Weitzman (1982), Reeve (1986), Weitzman (1987), Guidi and Trovato (2004), and Trovato (2005).

### **1985–: Additional criteria for** *eliminatio codicum descriptorum* **(Timpanaro, Reeve, and others)**

In the wake of Maas (1927, § 8a) and Pasquali (1932; 1934, 30–34), Timpanaro, Reeve, and others maintain that physical evidence is an important clue for proving that a manuscript is a *codex descriptus*, and not simply a relative of another witness to which it is very close but in relation to which it cannot be definitively positioned. In the words of Reeve's most important work on this topic:

Physical evidence is any peculiarity of a witness other than its reading that accounts for an innovation in another witness. The most familiar examples are physical changes, especially damage or misbinding: a tear in a Beneventan manuscript of Apuleius accounts for gaps in many later manuscripts, and Politian demonstrated in two traditions, those of Cicero's *Ad familiares* and Valerius Flaccus, that transpositions in the majority of manuscripts had their origin in extant manuscripts where leaves were misplaced. Perhaps the most familiar example of all is a physical accretion, the speck of straw in L of Euripides that the scribe of P reproduced as punctuation before it came away in 1960 under the heat of Zuntz's lamp and the finger of a librarian […]. A different form of physical evidence, not created by later accidents […], is peculiarities of layout. (Reeve 1989, 10–11, 13 = 2011a, 152, 155)

See also Timpanaro (1981) and Orlandi (1995 = 2008, 63–94).

### **1987–: New attempts to explain Bédier's so-called paradox (Weitzman and others)**

In the wake of Weitzman (1987; see "1982–" above), Guidi and I addressed the problem of the modifications that a real, or complete, tree (see "1946–" above) may exhibit after more or less severe loss of witnesses. We used the stemma of a relatively rich printed tradition from the sixteenth century (Sannazaro's *Arcadia*) as the model for a real tree (see fig. 2.4-3).

Then, we decided to decimate this model tree between 10 % and 90 %. I quote here from my handbook the summary of the results of this experiment:

Assuming a not too slender three-branched real tree, including some thirty witnesses, and – as is very often the case with the stemmata of the most diverse works – more or less markedly asymmetrical, low rates of decimation (from 10 to 30 %) do not result in very significant modifications. High decimation rates (70, 80, 90 %), however, result in:

The prevalence of two-branched stemmata thus depends on the intensity of decimation which in its turn depends on T, that is, as I said above, the time that elapsed between the early transmission of a given text and the genealogical classification of its surviving copies. (Trovato 2017, 92)

**Fig. 2.4-3:** The genealogical tree of a printed text (Sannazaro's *Arcadia*, second redaction), which is used as a model for a real tree and subjected to increasing decimation rates by Guidi and Trovato (2004, 23).

Several scholars (e.g. Divizia 2009, 42; L. Leonardi 2015) objected to our conclusions that a printed transmission is quite different from a manuscript tradition in many features. In my opinion, this point deserves close attention. Scientific modelling means generating a physical, conceptual, or mathematical representation of a real phenomenon that is difficult to observe directly. A theoretical model does not need to reproduce all the features of the phenomenon it intends to analyse. On the contrary: "Il problema fondamentale [nella scienza sperimentale] è stato quello di individuare per ogni fenomeno pochi dati giudicati rilevanti, decidendo di trascurare tutti gli altri" (Dalla Chiara and Toraldo di Francia 1999, 4) [The fundamental problem [in experimental science] has been to identify for each phenomenon the few data deemed relevant, deciding to neglect all the others]. For further details, I refer to Weitzman (1987) and Guidi and Trovato (2004), where the relationship between the loss of witnesses and the morphology of the stemma is studied in greater depth.

### **1995:** *Interpretatio* **vs** *iudicium***: On the correct interpretation of Lachmann's** *"***recensere sine interpretatione et possumus et debemus***"* **and of the term** *iudicium* **(Orlandi)**

Many scholars have criticised Lachmann's "recensere sine interpretatione et possumus et debemus" (1842–1850, 1:v) [we can and must undertake *recensio* without interpreting], often without even having read the context of the statement. In a lucid essay, Orlandi re-evaluated a good deal of Lachmann's bequest and analysed this well-known sentence in depth. After a close reading of Lachmann's words, he remarked:

Dovrebbe essere chiaro […] che il mantenersi al di qua dell'*interpretatio* non significa limitarsi a un lavoro meramente meccanico (quasi che la *recensio* e la conseguente *constitutio textus* non richiedessero scelte coscienti), bensi bandire, per quanto possibile, gli apprezzamenti personali sul pensiero dell'autore (o sulla sua poesia) per attenersi rigorosamente a ragioni oggettive: corruttele certe e indubitabili, lacune del testo, trasposizioni e così via. L'alternativa all'*interpretatio* è il *iudicium*: occorre rifuggire dalle scelte testuali fondate su preferenze individuali, e "giudicare" solo con l'ausilio dei fatti […]. Perciò la polemica anti-lachmanniana, tante volte ripresa, a favore dell'interpretazione che tutto pervade, dipende in ultimo da un equivoco terminologico. (Orlandi 1995, 13 = 2008, 106)

[It should be clear […] that abstaining from *interpretatio* does not mean limiting oneself to a merely mechanical task (as if the *recensio* and the consequent *constitutio textus* did not require conscious choices), but banning, as far as possible, personal appreciation of the thought of the author (or his poetry) in order to strictly comply with objective reasons: certain and undoubted corruptions, lacunae of the text, transpositions, and so on. The alternative to *interpretatio* is *iudicium*: we must avoid textual choices based on individual preferences, and "judge" only with the help of the facts […]. Therefore, the anti-Lachmannian controversy, claiming that interpretation is always present (so often repeated), is ultimately based on a terminological misunderstanding.]

### **2002–: Indicative errors again (Chiesa and Divizia)**

Returning to Maas's contrast between separative and conjunctive errors, Chiesa noted:

In pratica le innovazioni che effettivamente servono alla ricostruzione dello stemma sono quelle che identificano i gruppi in modo univoco. Quelle che possono essere poligenetiche non realizzano questa condizione perché la stessa innovazione può riferirsi a più di un gruppo; quelle che possono essere reversibili non la realizzano perché anche testimoni che non le riportano possono far parte del gruppo. (P. Chiesa 2002, 68)

[In practice, the innovations that are actually needed to reconstruct the stemma are those that identify the groups in a unequivocal way: those that could be polygenetic do not satisfy this condition because the same innovation may refer to more than one group; those that could be reversible do not satisfy it because even witnesses that do not contain them could be part of the group.]

Elaborating on the categories introduced by Chiesa, Divizia observes (the table in question is translated as table 2.4-2 below):

I concetti di congiunzione e separazione stanno dunque su piani diversi e non contrastanti, così come le categorie di monogeneticità/poligeneticità e irreversibilità/reversibilità da cui dipendono, che possiamo rappresentare – secondo il loro combinarsi – nella seguente tabella: (Divizia 2011, 58–59)

[The concepts of conjunction and separation are therefore on different and non-contrasting levels, as are the categories of monogeneticity/polygeneticity and irreversibility/reversibility on which they depend, which we can represent – according to their combination – as displayed in the following table.]

**Tab. 2.4-2:** A table recording the extreme poles of a continuum of the different kinds of innovation, translated from Divizia (2011, 59).

Divizia also adds:

Da quanto si è detto, si può vedere che le opposizioni monogeneticità/poligeneticità, irreversibilità/reversibilità e evidenza/adiaforia, non sono opposizioni booleane, ma rappresentano piuttosto i poli estremi di un *continuum* che prevede una svariata gamma di sfumature intermedi. (Divizia 2011, 59–60; emphasis in original)

[From what has been said, we can see that the oppositions between monogenetic and polygenetic innovations, irreversible and reversible innovations, inacceptable and equally acceptable innovations are not Boolean contraries, but rather represent the extreme poles of a *continuum* that provides a wide range of intermediate shades.]

### **2004: On the loss rate of mediaeval traditions (Guidi and Trovato)**

"What fraction of the total number of manuscripts at one time in existence is represented by those that survive: is it 50 %, or 20 %, or less?" This quotation is from Reynolds (2000, 3). In 2004, I tried to address, at least partially, this crucial question by looking outside mediaeval manuscript traditions. I worked on the few printed books of the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth century for which I could find the numbers of the initial prints, excepting booklets of a few folios (too thin to be easily preserved).

Loss ranges from 73 % for the parchment copies of the *Decretales* by Gregory IX and 76.9 % for Poggio's *Historia* to 100 % for some especially popular chivalric poems. Unsurprisingly, every edition has its own distinctive history. The only conclusion that can be drawn from these percentages is that, although the books in question were printed only a few decades before bookcollecting spread amongst the European aristocracy and high bourgeoisie […] and although an unknown but certainly significant number of early editions are still in private collections (but this is also true of manuscripts), natural calamities (including mice and bookworms), various ways of recycling parchment and paper, fires (including those started intentionally for ideological reasons, from Savonarola to the Inquisition, the Nazis, and Serbian nationalists), plundering, bombings, and mere use seem to have done away with the majority of early European printed production in the brief space of 500 years. I do not see valid reasons to imagine that the manuscripts of classical or medieval authors, which were exposed to the same agents for even longer periods, stood higher chances of survival. On the contrary, the fact that every printed book is produced in *n* copies, while manuscripts are unica, suggests that, with the increase of T [that is Time, Temporal distance], losses among handwritten texts were even more dramatic. (Trovato 2017, 108, based on Guidi and Trovato 2004, 27–29)

Loss rates are smaller in subsequent centuries. Thus:

The probability that one of the many (and converging) factors in the possible destruction of a book, whether handwritten or printed (fires, floods, war, mold, use …), will cause its loss increases proportionally to the temporal distance (T) between us and the early copies. (Trovato 2017, 135)

As a consequence of this very high loss rate, there is a high probability that surviving mediaeval textual traditions stem solely from witnesses belonging to some vulgate tradition (see Guidi and Trovato 2004; "1987–" above).

### **2009: Multi-text codices and cluster philology (Divizia)**

The genealogical method, as is well known, does not work with very short texts (lyric poems, letters, and the like), which as a rule do not contain enough indicative errors to reconstruct a stemma. Elaborating upon studies by Barbi, De Robertis, Reeve, and others, Paolo Divizia theorised that not-obvious clusters of texts collated as a unique relatively long text could permit the determination of filiation. See Divizia (2009, 2017).

### **2019: Methods for studying scribal behaviour and scribal habits (Marchetti)**

One of the aims of the so-called New Philology is the assessment of scribal behaviour, but the studies published so far do not provide relevant information. The Colwell method, named after Ernest C. Colwell (1901–1974), proposes, once a manuscript is chosen, attributing to the copyist all its *lectiones singulares* without attempting to make any distinction between group and individual innovations. Elaborating upon tenets of genealogical textual criticism such as *eliminatio codicum descriptorum* and combining the rationales of common errors and codicological evidence (see "1937" and "1985–" above), Marchetti studied in his PhD thesis five pairs

of an exemplar and its copy (*exemplar* and *descriptus*) of Dante's *Commedia* belonging to different areas, years, and graphic models. The outcome is that, while innovations in the accidental readings are around 90 % of all variant readings, professional copyists, at least in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, have a dramatically low rate of significant innovations. Both if *exemplar* and *descriptus* are in a "bad" position in the genealogy (i.e. they share a number of common errors) and if they are in a prominent position (i.e. they exhibit only a few common errors), these copyists introduce new significant errors only once every eight hundred lines. There is no need to emphasise that the research of Marchetti – who is planning to verify his findings in other manuscript traditions – seems useful not only as a model for rigorously evaluating scribal behaviour but also as a diagnostic tool: whenever scholars face two or more copies which present (*i*) a high number of common errors and (*ii*) a dramatically low rate of *errores singulares*, they can suspect (even if codicological evidence is missing) that those copies could be in an *exemplar*–*descriptus* relation, or very close to this kind of relation.

My list, which is certainly, up to a point, personal and subjective and even partial, ends here. It can easily be enriched by readers, especially if they work in other research fields. Classical scholars will note, for example, the absence of references to the contributions of a master such as Jean Irigoin, but I preferred to work only on issues which I could master, at least to some extent. There is no need to underline that many of the additions and updates reviewed here are closely bound up with the starting assumptions of the founding fathers of the method. As Popper would put it, the theories of textual transmission on which the genealogical method was based were "passed on not as dogmas, but rather with the challenge to discuss them and improve upon them" (1965, 50). Therefore, they have become richer and more comprehensive. On the one hand, they are able to explain in a simple way intuitions of Lachmann's contemporaries which had not been adequately clarified (e.g. the very notion of "archetype"). On the other hand, they allow both predictions and diagnoses (e.g. that a two-branched stemma indicates, as a rule, that the witnesses suffered a high loss rate).

### **2.4.4 Neo-Lachmannism in the third millennium**

As is naturally to be expected, as soon as cladistics and other forms of computerassisted philology (the greatest novelty of the end of the last century) reached a certain maturity, their promises of amazing advances and their polemical stances against the method of common errors has diminished. The latter has more and more become recognised as a method "there is no need to defend" and whose "main elements […] are simply self-evident" (I quote from an email by Odd Einar Haugen to the authors of this chapter). Even a champion of the "new digital frontiers" of textual criticism such as Peter Robinson could declare in 2013:

There has been a great deal of rhetoric, some of it from myself, in the last decades about how scholarly editions and editing have been fundamentally changed by the digital turn. So let me say it plainly. *I don't think there has been any such change. A scholarly edition is still, as it has been for centuries, an argument about a text. The fundamental players in this argument are still documents, works, and the editor's interpretation of them*. The editor is the editor, and not a "facilitator". There are still many more readers than editors, and most readers do not want to be editors. (Robinson 2013b; my emphasis)

In this different context, in a situation of greater mutual respect between philologists who favour the new methods and "traditional" textual scholars, there are signals suggesting that a renewed interest in a refined kind of genealogical textual criticism is spreading even in fields and cultural traditions that have in the past shown little interest in what happens outside the confines of their own horizons. As many of the various traditions are studied in depth in chapter 7, I restrict myself to briefly commenting on a few examples.

In France, a country where scholars traditionally follow in the wake of the Bédierist (or maybe better neo-Bédierist) tradition, the few textual critics open to the genealogical method – who were until recently confined to the Ecole des chartes and the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes (IRHT) – are especially productive. I mention here only the non-Bédierist manual by Bourgain and Vielliard (2002), the interesting collection edited by Frédéric Duval (2006), and the latter's lexicon *Les Mots de l'édition de textes* (Duval 2015).

It becomes clear even from the terminology that Alberto Blecua uses in his survey – "Wagner confused polygenetic errors and modernizations with authentic common errors" (1995, 470), "the ten manuscripts […] offer not varying versions, but, rather, scribal variants that had to be organized into a stemma" (472), "the criteria of *lectio difficilior* and diffraction" (473), and so on – that he has been spreading a very solid and up-to-date neo-Lachmannism in Spanish-speaking countries. He did the same also in his excellent manual (Blecua 1983) and his works of textual criticism (collected in Blecua 2012).

As has been noted, Russia

did not develop its own tradition of stemmatics and the introduction of the printing press led to the search for a standard of uniformity, largely based on the ideological choices of church clerics, rather than to attention to text history. As a consequence Bédier's anti-stemmatic approach […] was easily adopted and widely accepted during the Soviet period. (Bausi et al. 2015, 322)

Thus, and even though the Italian Angiolo Danti had tried to disseminate for many years the practices of neo-Lachmannism among Slavonic scholars (cf. the posthumously published collection Danti 1993), I consider it a very significant fact that both a partial Polish and a complete Russian translation of Maas (1960) have appeared since 1994 (trans. Sybilska 1994; trans. Toršilov 2011). For a reconsideration of Maas's fortunes as well as his importance, see now the introduction by Ziffer in Maas (2017).

In biblical studies, which for decades were quite isolated compared to other philologies, a desire to make contact with colleagues from other fields of textual criticism that seemed unimaginable a few years ago has developed. The discovery of and the research on the Qumran manuscripts certainly brought new life to the field. For instance, there is a very popular blog on Greek New Testament textual criticism, *Evangelical Textual Criticism*, with more than 4,700,000 page views as of September 22, 2018 (evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com), which publishes very interesting short contributions almost on a daily basis (I mention here only the one entitled "Top Ten Essential Works in New Testament Textual Criticism", which led to thirty-nine posts). The recent, very interesting book by Hendel (2016), called *Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible*, contains long quotations in English from works written in Italian by Pasquali, Contini, Segre, Chiesa, and the present writer.

In Sanskrit studies, besides Western textual scholars, there is a long tradition of Indian scholars educated abroad and knowledgeable about Western philological approaches (e.g. Sukthankar, Katre, De). In 1954, Katre published a revised edition of his *Introduction to Indian Textual Criticism*, in which, among other things, he offered "a glossary of some important terms used in textual criticism" and stated: "Textual criticism has come to India to stay" (quoted in Rocher 1995, 587). From the point of view of the present overview, it is worthwhile underlining, again, the interest in and comparison with European neo-Lachmannism evident in recent Indian publications (e.g. quotations from Barbi, Contini, Leonardi, Pasquali, Reeve, and Trovato in Adluri and Bagchee 2018).

A survey of Ethiopic editions can be found in Bausi 2016a (and 7.5 below). Moreover, we must remember the companion by Bausi et al. (2015), where the third chapter is dedicated to "textual criticism and text editing". This long chapter, authored by Caroline Macé et al. (pages 321–462), has a number of very detailed sections (e.g. "Textual Criticism and Oriental Languages", "Steps towards an Edition", "Heuristics of Manuscripts and Witnesses", "Witness Classification and History of the Text", "Apparatuses", "Philological Introduction, Translation, Commentary, Indexes and Appendices"), and offers a wealth of case studies. The chapter's introduction begins by referring to Lachmann's method, which

can be very roughly summarized as follows: complete survey of all the direct and indirect witnesses of the work to be edited (manuscripts, printed editions, quotations, allusions, translations, etc.); defining mutual relationships between the witnesses; reconstruction of an archetypal text. Since the critical edition is a scientific hypothesis, it can be disputed and new hypotheses can be proposed or new evidence can be found, which is why some mediaeval texts are edited more than once. (Bausi et al. 2015, 321)

### And further:

In recent times, the opponents of the genealogical method of textual criticism and of the reconstructive method of text editing often associated with it are mustered under the flag of "new philology", a trend in scholarship which came about in the 1990s especially in the United States (see Gleßgen – Lebsanft 1997), following the publication of Cerquiglini (1989), claiming that mediaeval literature being by nature variable, mediaeval works should not be reduced to an edited text, but all mediaeval manuscripts should be considered equally valuable […]. *However attractive the "new philology" approach may be in the field of literary studies, it is nevertheless almost completely irrelevant for the purpose of this chapter, as it does not provide any method to edit texts with a more complex manuscript tradition*. (Bausi et al. 2015, 321; my emphasis)

To come to a close, one cannot but be impressed by the distance between these formulations and the attempt by Carter to justify objectively the impossibility of applying criteria of Western textual criticism to Arabic texts:

Both filiation and copy-text present themselves as different from the corresponding topics that have attracted so much attention in Western editing […]. Knowledge is, after all, the common property of the community, administered and distributed by people of probity and recognized competence – for this reason there is probably a much lower proportion of truly anonymous works in Arabic than one finds in medieval European literature. *It is therefore unlikely that the indigenous Arabic manuscript tradition will reflect the principles and objectives of modern editing*. (Carter 1995, 556–557; my emphasis)

All in all, one gets the impression that this beginning of a new millennium may herald a vaster diffusion and a more conscious application of those most conspicuous refinements of the method of common errors which, not without hesitation, we have proposed calling the neo-Lachmannian method.

# **3 Towards the construction of a stemma**

Introductory remarks by the chapter editor, Marina Buzzoni

The elaboration of a *stemma codicum*, representing the filiation between the witnesses that transmit a text whose original is lost, is the core of the genealogical method: on the one hand, only once these relationships have been determined can text restoration be tackled; on the other hand, the stemma may be the goal of the work of synthesising a certain textual tradition. In order to construct a stemma, some preliminary steps are needed; these steps are specifically treated in the sections of the present chapter.

The first step of the stemmatic workflow – namely, the identification of both direct and indirect witnesses (technically: heuristics) – is the subject of Gabriel Viehhauser's contribution (3.1). After sketching a brief history of the concept, he addresses the issue of how the heuristic process is carried out after the material turn in the twentieth century, providing useful information about both the traditional and the more recent tools that researchers have at their disposal. Particularly relevant is the advent of digital catalogues and digital facsimiles, which can offer easier and faster access to primary sources. This development has profound consequences for framing the history of transmission of a text, as shown in the critical review of various *Parzival* editorial projects based on different heuristic approaches.

Caroline Macé (3.2) deals with a frequently neglected aspect of editorial practice: the use of the indirect tradition of a given text (e.g. translations and rewritings, quotations, interpolations, glosses, and marginal notes) for stemmatological purposes. The conclusion reached, namely that "the main point of using indirect witnesses is that their text has been preserved 'outside' of the main tradition; they can therefore be used as an 'outgroup' […] to orientate the stemma", is central from a methodological point of view. The indirect tradition can also be used to document the early history of textual traditions – especially when indirect witnesses are older than the oldest extant direct ones of a given work – as well as the appearance of (hyp)archetypes. Despite their relevance for stemmatic analysis, she warns us to use indirect witnesses with great caution due to the methodological difficulties inherent to them.

In her section (3.3), Tara Andrews addresses the problems of transcribing and then comparing (technically: collating) the different instances of a text preserved in several witnesses. In so doing, she presents both non-digital and digital ways of transcribing and collating witnesses, providing also some insights into the current theoretical debate on what these processes and the results they produce mean to different scholars and scholarly communities. She offers a definition of the central notion of a "variant location", which arises when different witnesses show different readings at a point that can be considered "the same place" in the text. The discovery of these places is key to the establishment of a stemma, as the set of variant locations is the information with which a stemmatic analysis is performed. In a traditional perspective, a distinction is primarily to be made between substantial readings and formal ones: usually, only the former are clues for determining the genealogical relationships between witnesses (see, among many others, Stussi 2006, 9–10). Andrews, however, discusses all variation (close to the traditional notion of *varia lectio*) – including, for example, spelling differences, abbreviation marks, and different letter forms – that may or may not later undergo a process of normalisation for the purposes of publication or for the purposes of stemmatic analysis, or both. The extent of normalisation, as well as the rules followed by the editors, depends on their judgement and the methods they adopt.

Once stemmatologically relevant data have been produced, they need to be represented, a need which is particularly acute when the editor chooses to take recourse to computational methods. Joris van Zundert's section (3.4) focuses mainly on the representation in various digital forms of both input and output information for computational stemmatological analysis. This is highly relevant, for the aim of data formats is not just to ensure the proper storage of data but also to favour its processing by algorithms specific to the data they represent. Besides, van Zundert turns his attention to two further key points: (*i*) whether the chosen format is best suited to the type of analysis the editor wants to perform, and (*ii*) interoperability, since "the scholar should also consider how other scholars and other software may want to reuse the data, and whether the chosen format supports such reuse well". Finally, he underlines that the choice of a specific data format may be influenced by considerations about the presentation of the data, either in separate form or within the broader context of a digital scholarly edition.

The four sections that make up this chapter demonstrate that even the steps that at first sight may appear merely descriptive or mechanical (e.g. the transcription of witnesses and their encoding using a given markup language) are actually always interpretative. In fact, they depend on the methods adopted for the analysis of the text and its witnesses, as well as ultimately on the very idea of textuality the editor embraces and intends to foster. The methods adopted may in turn be based on the type of textual tradition under inspection (e.g. an active tradition usually requires a different approach than a quiescent one; see "1970" in 2.4.3), as well as on the language of the text.

### **3.1 Heuristics of witnesses**

Gabriel Viehhauser

In textual scholarship, h e u r i s t i c s is the identification and collection of d i r e c t and i n d i r e c t w i t n e s s e s (on the latter, see 3.2) of a text or a text corpus. Although often only discussed in the context of *recensio*, heuristics precedes *collatio*, *examinatio*, and *emendatio* in traditional outlines of t e xtual criticism (see 6.2), and is commonly regarded as the first step of the editorial workflow.

Different philologies and disciplines arguably have specific perspectives on heuristics, mainly because of diverse research traditions but also because of the differences in the amount of extant witnesses that have to be dealt with (e.g. between Latin and vernacular traditions). This means that, although the following account aims at a comprehensive overview, it necessarily has to work with discipline-specific examples.

### **3.1.1 History**

The idea of collecting witnesses to reconstruct a text can be traced back to the φιλόλογοι of the library of Alexandria, where, for instance, Callimachus of Cyrene (ca. 310–240 BC) compiled a catalogue of 120 volumes or Aristophanes of Byzantium (ca. 257–180 BC) established a bibliography of canonical Greek writers that had a decisive impact on their later transmission (Greetham 1994, 14–15). The library also collected different manuscripts of the same texts as a basis for the efforts of the φιλόλογοι (Greetham 1994, 15; on the case of Homer, see Plachta and van Vliet 2000, 15). However, a systematic concept of heuristics did not gain major importance until the emergence of critical philology in the nineteenth century (consider also the simultaneous development of the tripartite division between "heuristics", "source criticism", and "interpretation" in the "historical method" of the nineteenth century in historiography; Lorenz 2002, 139). In textual criticism, the insistence on a full survey of the extant transmission was based in particular on the rejection of the common practice of editing texts only on the basis of a single manuscript (especially the oldest manuscript or the vulgate version). According to Lachmann, an edition had to be built on a "hinreichende Menge an guten Handschriften" (Lachmann 1876, 1:82) [sufficient quantity of good manuscripts] (on Lachmann's predecessors in this respect, see Timpanaro 2005, 115), which served as the foundation for a critical examination of the transmission (*recensio*). Therefore, it was not enough to consult the witnesses only occasionally (for the correction of individual errors); this had to be done systematically in order to gain an overview of the genealogy of the manuscripts beforehand from which to build the basis for all future editorial decisions. Besides direct witnesses, this also includes indirect witnesses (translations or quotations of the text to be edited), fragments, and anthologies that contain the text (on which, see 3.2).

However, in Lachmann's conception, the manuscripts were of interest only insofar as they fostered the reconstruction of the archetype; Lachmann himself did not base all of his editions on the full range of known manuscripts because he did not see the need to go too far into the details of the transmission. Consequently, manuscripts were only relevant as witnesses of the text, but not in their importance as historical documents of their time, in other words in their m a t e r i a l i t y. This clearly changed with the material turn of philology in the twentieth century (see Bein 2010). Against this backdrop, manuscript or print catalogues, which are of major importance as a tool for heuristics (see 3.1.3), obtain an interesting intermediate position between abstract indexes and detailed descriptions of the transmission, for they do not only register shelfmarks but also data about the provenance, language, layout, and material aspects of a manuscript. Thus, these traditional heuristic tools can also be useful for a kind of philology with a stronger orientation towards material aspects, one that is not only interested in the reconstruction of an archetype but also in the transmission history of a text. These two functions of a catalogue correspond to the distinction between the concepts of an enumerative vs an analytical bibliography: whereas the former confines itself to a list of sources, the latter also provides information with which to examine the sources as material artefacts (Greetham 1994, 7). The shift towards the materiality of texts is substantially helped by the advent of digital catalogues, which can be linked to digital facsimiles and therefore offer a more detailed picture of the manuscript cultures of the past. Thus, the same tendency that can be observed in the case of digital editions, namely the tendency towards a broadening of contexts (Sahle 2013, 2:168–172) fostered by the openness and the limitlessness of the digital medium, also holds true for digital catalogues: since catalogues do not have to be confined to printed book pages any longer, they can be enriched with various kinds of metadata and hyperlinks pointing to a huge amount of different online resources.

### **3.1.2 Implications of heuristics for building a stemma – an example**

The different historical phases of attitudes towards heuristics, as outlined in section 3.1.1, have consequences for the devising of a stemma. In this respect, four phases may be discerned: (*i*) a pre-Lachmannian one, where the edition of a text did not necessarily imply a systematic pursuit of heuristics; (*ii*) an early phase of heuristics that meets Lachmann's stipulation to consider a sufficient basis of good manuscripts, but is as yet unable to draw on comprehensive catalogues of witnesses and on easily accessible sources; (*iii*) a phase where the heuristic work can rely on printed library catalogues and is thus based in principle on the whole transmission, but is sometimes still hampered by poor accessibility of the sources; and (*iv*) a phase that is shaped by the seemingly unlimited possibilities of the Internet and its digital resources. It may be added that the general approach, namely that of undertaking a study of the entire extant transmission, has, in theory, remained the same in phases (*ii*) to (*iv*).

Therefore, in the following, these four phases will each be characterised by a case study from the edition history of the Middle High German Grail romance *Parzival*, by Wolfram von Eschenbach, from the beginning of the thirteenth century. The text was one of the most successful German courtly romances, if its transmission is anything to go by. Today, sixteen complete manuscripts, one incunabulum from the year 1477, and around seventy fragments are known to be extant.

(*i*) The first modern print edition was established by Christoph Heinrich Myller, a student of the famous Swiss scholar Johann Jakob Bodmer, in 1784. The edition was based on a copy of St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 857 (the *St. Galler Epenhandschrift*) that Myller received from Bodmer. Bodmer himself knew two sources of the *Parzival* text: an exemplar of the incunabulum (which is now in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, 2.103) and the St Gall codex. It is quite likely that Bodmer compared these two sources for his own works, which include modern adaptations of selected parts of *Parzival*, since it appears that the text of his adaptations is based on variant readings from both sources (Mertens 2011, 723). However, Myller, Bodmer's student, obviously did not strive to collect different exemplars for his edition, let alone to construct a stemma of the text, and only used Bodmer's modern copy of the St Gall manuscript.

(*ii*) Before Karl Lachmann, the first scholarly editor of *Parzival*, established his famous critical *Wolfram-Ausgabe* of 1833, he published an anthology of mediaeval texts which also included parts of Myller's edition, not without criticising the earlier editor for basing it solely on one manuscript (Lachmann 1820, viii; see Mertens 2011, 726). In order to prepare his own edition of 1833, Lachmann used two copies of Myller's edition, which he took with him on his travels to the libraries of St Gall, Heidelberg, and Munich. In order to collate the text, Lachmann inscribed the variant readings of the manuscripts into those copies (McCulloh 1983). Although Lachmann knew by this time of thirteen manuscripts as well as the incunabulum of *Parzival* (from a catalogue created by Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen which was established in 1812), he himself did not use or even examine all of these sources for his edition, because he thought that, in the case of the *Parzival* transmission, three manuscripts were often reliable and representative enough to create his critical text (Schirok 1999, lix). Lachmann never devised a stemma of the *Parzival* tradition, but he claimed that the extant manuscripts can be grouped into two classes which are in principle "von gleichem werth" (Schirok 1999, xix) [of the same value]. These classes are known in *Parzival* philology as classes *\*D* and *\*G*. For the greater part of his text, he followed a representative of class *\*D*, namely the St Gall codex which had already been the basis for Myller's edition. In fact, it appears that, because his workflow relied heavily on the two exemplars of Myller's edition, Lachmann's text even inherited some of the errors that Myller had made in the reproduction of the manuscript (McCulloh 1983; see also below 7.4.1).

(*iii*) Since Lachmann was only interested in the tradition insofar as it (according to him) justified the text of his edition, more precise research on the stemmatic relationships remained to be undertaken by later scholars. Eduard Hartl, who was responsible for the sixth and seventh editions of Lachmann's *Wolfram-Ausgabe*, was the first of Lachmann's successors to try to reconsider Lachmann's findings on the basis of the whole manuscript tradition (of which by then all sixteen manuscripts and a large amount of fragments were known). Although Hartl was only able to publish one volume of the comprehensive *Textgeschichte* he had in mind (Hartl 1928), he identified four manuscripts which constitute a stemmatic group of their own (in Hartl's terminology, class *\*W*, now *\*T*). Lachmann did not know, or did not take into account, any of the manuscripts of this group for his edition. Even if Hartl was not very clear about it, it seems that he considered this group *\*T* to be a subgroup of *\*G*, but thought that it was heavily contaminated with *\*D*. The most striking evidence for this are twenty-two passages where *\*G* lacks lines compared to *\*D* (they are not necessary for the comprehension of the text and therefore cannot be considered *Bindefehler*). *\*T* partly shares this loss of verses, but only in eight of the twenty-two passages. The far more obvious stemmatic explanation for this observation, namely that *\*G* and *\*T* are both descendants of a group *\*GT*, was ruled out as unlikely by Gesa Bonath (1970). However, Bonath could base her judgement only on the variant readings of the first quarter of *Parzival* because she had to rely on Hartl's studies that remained incomplete (for details, see Chlench and Viehhauser 2014). Thus, it seems that there are mainly two reasons why the position of *\*T* in the stemma of *Parzival* was obviously misjudged by Hartl and Bonath: first, the reductive approach of Lachmann fostered a canonical notion of the *Parzival* transmission as split into the two groups, *\*D* and *\*G*, which was hard to overcome; and second, despite knowing all the extant manuscripts, Hartl and Bonath obviously did not have the resources to consider the relatively wide manuscript tradition in its entirety. Even if in the times of Hartl and Bonath printed catalogues provided potential support for a heuristics that enabled scholars to find all the known manuscripts, those manuscripts could not always be easily accessed and considered in practice.

(*iv*) A thorough examination of the *Parzival* tradition has been made possible by the digital *Parzival* project (parzival.unibe.ch). The project aims at a digital edition of the text that considers all of the extant witnesses and provides digital transcriptions of them (Stolz 2002). In the project, digital phylogenetic methods have been used to visualise the stemmatic relations of the manuscripts (Stolz 2003). Along with the use of new methods, the project also offers a new attitude towards the transmission: instead of reconstructing an "original" text, it focuses on tracing the outlines of the three-centuries-long transmission history of *Parzival*. This also includes a new assessment of the classes of the text's witnesses. While Hartl and Bonath in principle considered *\*D*, *\*G*, and *\*T* as subordinated groups of the archetype, the *Parzival* project is based on four versions which are treated as manifestations of the text in their own right (on *\*T*, see esp. Schöller 2009). Besides *\*D*, *\*G*, and *\*T*, it was possible to identify a further class, *\*m*. While *\*m* is mainly transmitted in three codices of the fifteenth century produced in the workshop of Diebold Lauber, and shares a single reading with a very short (and therefore not very indicative) fragment from the thirteenth century (*F 6*), the discovery of a longer fragment from the fourteenth century in 2006 (*F 69*; see Schneider 2006) corroborated the evidence that the group is not a late redaction from the workshop but dates back to earlier times. As this example demonstrates, not only the availability of comprehensive catalogues but also the accessibility of the sources is crucial for heuristics.

This exemplary review of the history of *Parzival* philology shows that the assessment of the stemmatic relationships of a text sometimes cannot be seen independently from the material basis that underlies the philological endeavour. Whereas Myller only had a very constrained knowledge of the transmission and used a modern copy of a manuscript text for his edition, Lachmann could in principle have drawn on catalogues for his heuristic work; however, since he did not yet have microfiche copies or facsimiles of the texts at hand, he had to undertake demanding journeys to see the manuscripts, which he then had to collate in a way that consumed as little time as possible. It seems that his lack of interest in the details of the transmission goes hand in hand with the need to employ a practical approach towards the collection of the witnesses. While Bonath and Hartl could rely on more modern tools for heuristics, they too did not have unlimited access to the transmission. It could be argued that the picture of *Parzival* transmission in the first one hundred years of editorial attention was strongly shaped by insufficient means to pursue the ideal of a complete heuristics of the whole textual transmission, which is most strikingly illustrated by the fact that printing errors in Myller's edition can be found even in the later revised editions of Lachmann's *Wolfram-Ausgabe*. In the case of *Parzival*, a comprehensive view of the transmission was only achieved using the possibilities of a digital edition that includes electronic facsimiles and transcriptions of the text.

Of course, a case study like this can only show tendencies and should not be overgeneralised. In contrast to *Parzival*, in many other traditions it was possible to establish reliable editions on the basis of complete heuristics of witnesses even before the advent of digital methods. Furthermore, the example of the newly found fragment of class *\*m* shows that, even in digitally informed times, it is conceivable that the discovery of hitherto unknown witnesses can change the assessment of the transmission.

### **3.1.3 Old and new tools for heuristics**

Since there is no single printed bibliography that can cover all existing books or manuscripts, and bibliographies therefore necessarily have to be selective (see Greetham 1994, 5), the heuristics of manuscript witnesses very often has to be based on a variety of sources. A first starting point is provided by libraries and their catalogues (see 1.3). In the modern period, libraries began systematically collecting books in the thirteenth century. Prominent early examples of catalogues that exceed the scope of individual libraries by uniting different collections are the *Registrum librorum Angliae* and the *Catalogus scriptorum ecclesiae* (Bischoff 1990, 203; Russell 2001, 27– 28; Greetham 1994, 18). Besides the emerging public or semi-public libraries, private collections of the new humanist scholars provided valuable resources (Greetham 1994, 18), but according to Greetham it was not until 1627 and Gabriel Naudé's theoretical treatise *Avis pour dresser une bibliothèque* "that a true systematic enumera-

**Fig. 3.1-1:** Page from a thematic manuscript catalogue (A. Beccaria 1956, 176) listing the content of a medical miscellany.

tive bibliography as related to the organization of book collections got under way" (Greetham 1994, 18). Catalogues may focus on manuscripts from single libraries or on specific languages (e.g. the catalogue of German manuscripts from the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg by M. Miller and Zimmermann 2007) as well as on specific temporal or thematic constellations (e.g. the catalogue of illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth century from the Staatsbibliothek München by Klemm 1998, or A. Beccaria 1956 on pre-Salernitan Latin medical manuscripts; see fig. 3.1-1). Greetham (1994, 24–46), provides an extensive list of national and regional catalogues (especially for the United States, the United Kingdom, and France) and other bibliographical resources. An example of an important metacatalogue which assembles catalogues, inventories, and other resources for Latin manuscripts is Kristeller's *Latin Manuscript Books before 1600: A List of the Printed Catalogues and Unpublished Inventories of Extant Collections* (Kristeller and Krämer 1993; Krämer 2007).

In recent times, access to these catalogues and other resources on textual witnesses has been substantially facilitated by the retro-digitisation of catalogues and resources (e.g. the online version of Kristeller and Krämer 1993 and Krämer 2007 on mgh-bibliothek.de/kristeller, or the extensive list of retro-digitised catalogues on manuscripta-mediaevalia.de) and the advent of a vast amount of digital search tools on the Internet. The interlinking of different resources also opens up new possibilities for comprehensive research and the combination of hitherto separated knowledge bases. However, interoperability can only be achieved on the back of standardised metadata descriptions for entries (e.g. Dublin Core, dublincore.org; TEI, tei-c.org; OAI-PMH, openarchives.org/pmh/; see S. J. Miller 2011). Digital catalogues, therefore, have to be diligently built according to such standards to reach their full potential and to increase their chances of long-term sustainability. In particular, techniques related to the Semantic Web and linked data appear to be promising for this endeavour (Burrows 2010; Baierer et. al. 2016). Once these standards are met, more detailed analyses and visualisations of the material also become conceivable: provenances of manuscripts (for instance) could be geolocated on a map, which might also lead to new insights that can be used for the heuristics of witnesses.

Since the online resources for manuscript research are manifold, divergent in scope, quality, methods, and aspirations, and – due to the fluctuation of the Internet – also sometimes only short-lived (see e.g. the overview of German portals in Stäcker 2010), it is not feasible to give a comprehensive list of all digital catalogues for all traditions in this contribution. Instead, the potential of online resources will be illustrated by an example, namely handschriftencensus.de, which strives to list all German-language manuscripts and fragments from AD 750 to 1520 on a single website. The scope of the project hence encompasses approximately 26,000 witnesses that are held in over 1,500 libraries. The *Handschriftencensus* continues the efforts of the handwritten *Handschriftenarchiv* of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, which began a systematic list of German manuscripts in the early twentieth century (see Wolf 2007) and is now also available in a retro-digitised form (bbaw.de/ forschung/dtm/HSA/hsa-index.html). Compared to the handwritten catalogue cards of the *Handschriftenarchiv*, a digital collection like the *Handschriftencensus* offers refined search functions (manuscripts can be listed by authors, works, or libraries) and the possibility of linking catalogue descriptions with digital facsimiles. The website also includes a list of manuscript catalogues and a bibliography that can – like all the resources of the website – be continually updated.

As an example, a search for manuscripts of the *Parzival* tradition in the *Handschriftencensus* will outline a possible workflow for heuristics in the digital age. On its starting page, the *Handschriftencensus* offers two of the above-mentioned possibilities for accessing the database of witnesses: either by sorting the manuscripts according to the libraries that hold them ("Verzeichnisse" > "Handschriften") or by searching for authors or works ("Verzeichnisse" > "Autoren/Werke"). With the latter approach, "Wolfram von Eschenbach" and "*Parzival*" can be searched for or

**Fig. 3.1-2:** The beginning of the list of *Parzival* manuscripts in the *Handschriftencensus* (handschriftencensus.de, accessed October 15, 2019).

selected from an alphabetical index. This search leads to a list of eighty-seven results that indicate the libraries and the shelfmarks of the known witnesses (fig. 3.1- 2). Full codices are marked with a black square bullet point, fragments with a white one. Also, fragments that originally belonged to the same codex, but are now preserved in different libraries, are grouped together. By clicking on an entry, a full catalogue description of the witness can be obtained. It encompasses codicological details such as the number of folios, the size of the codex, a possible dating, and so on; the content (and context) of the codex; and finally a bibliography. If there are facsimiles (or parts of the bibliography) available online, the respective websites are linked. Due to the possibility of adding new entries to the list in the digital medium, the *Handschriftencensus* remains updated and also includes witnesses found only recently (e.g. the above-mentioned *F 69*, which plays an important role in the assessment of the *\*m* version).

### **3.2 Indirect tradition**

Caroline Macé

Apart from direct witnesses containing a work (most usually manuscripts), the editor will be well advised to make an inventory of the indirect tradition, that is, of any other works or versions of a work that can bear witness to the history of the textual tradition in question, to the establishment of the stemma, and finally to the establishment of the text itself. This inventory is important for the history of the reception of the work, but may often yield some insights into the history of the tradition as well. Of course, these indirect witnesses are themselves generally preserved in manuscripts and have their own textual histories and editorial problems.

### **3.2.1 Types of indirect witnesses**

The indirect tradition of a work may consist of

In addition to this, direct witnesses preserved in o t h e r m e d i a than manuscripts (e.g. graffiti or papyri) or as underwriting in palimpsests may be considered similar to indirect witnesses since the text preserved in them may have followed different paths of transmission than the usual direct tradition.

The importance of indirect witnesses for the establishment of the stemma and of the edition will depend mostly on their antiquity and, more importantly, on their position in the stemma, on their fidelity to the original work (otherwise they may not be usable), and on the reliability of the editions through which they are accessible (or, failing that, of the witnesses transmitting them). In general, Dekkers and Hoste showed that, even in the case of well-preserved late antique works, the indirect tradition is crucial for establishing the text (*constitutio textus*; see 6.2 below): "Les citations anciennes sont une véritable pierre de touche pour distinguer les bons mss. des mss. corrompus" (Dekkers and Hoste 1980, 36) [Ancient citations are truly a touchstone for distinguishing the good manuscripts from the corrupted ones].

Some ancient and mediaeval works have an exclusively "indirect" existence, as all direct witnesses have disappeared and the work is known only through translations or citations. This is the case, for example, with three treatises on providence, free will, and evil by the Neo-Platonist Proclus Diadochus (fifth century CE; see 4.5.2), which are preserved in a thirteenth-century Latin translation and in citations (or plagiarism) by Isaac Komnenos the *sebastocrator* from the twelfth century (Isaac 1977, 22–25). See also the case discussed in section 4.5.4 below.

### **3.2.2 Translations**

Late antique and mediaeval translations are potentially precious witnesses to the work from which they are translated, especially when they were made before the time of the oldest manuscripts of that work in its original language that are preserved. In the case of Greek and, to a lesser extent, Latin texts, manuscripts earlier than the beginning of the ninth century, that is, before the change from majuscule to minuscule, are relatively rare (see 1.2.3), and palimpsests or translations made before the ninth century are therefore very valuable.

When dealing with translations, scholars will face different types of problems. First, it is not so easy to find translations of a given work in languages with which the editor is not familiar. For Greek patristic works, the *Clavis Patrum Graecorum* (Geerard and Noret 1984–2018) often mentions translations into Latin (see also Siegmund 1949), the languages of the Christian Orient (Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Syriac), and Old Slavonic. This is not done systematically, but it is nevertheless a valuable help. For several languages, scholars have provided lists and bibliographical tools, such as, for example, Graf (1944) for Arabic, Thomson (1995, 29–88) for Armenian, and the ongoing *Catalogus translationum et commentariorum* (Kristeller 1960–2003; Dinkova-Bruun 2014–2016) for Latin. Second, the translation might not be edited at all, as translations are often considered less important in the literary canon of a language, or edited in a way which does not meet modern standards (see Macé et al. 2015, 374, 435–439, on nineteenth-century editions of Armenian texts and editions of Syriac texts in the twentieth century respectively). An exemplary enterprise, but certainly not the only one, is represented by the critical editions of Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, and Syriac translations of Gregory of Nazianzus' homilies (fourth century CE) in the *Corpus Nazianzenum*, with a special apparatus highlighting the differences between the translations and the Greek originals (see e.g. Coulie 1994; fig. 3.2-1 below). One important methodological rule for editions of translations is that one should not correct the translator's mistakes, but only mistakes that may have appeared in the manuscript tradition of the translated text. In other words, the editor of a translation must attempt to reconstruct the text of the archetype of the tradition in the translation's language, using the text in the source language as a hint for orientating the stemma, but should resist the temptation of "correcting" the translator's text on the basis of that source. Moreover, the exact source used by the translator is often difficult to assess, and may not exist any longer.

### **Example 1**

In figure 3.2-1, the difference between the edited Armenian text and the Greek original, as indicated in note 10, is most probably due to a confusion of two words which are graphically close in Greek, but not synonyms ("εὐσεβῶν" [pious] and "εὐσεβειῶν" [piety], both in the genitive plural), by the Armenian translator; the editor of the Armenian text kept the translator's mistake in the edited text. Divergences from the original can also point to original (primary) readings that have disappeared from the direct tradition, as with the reading given in note 8 in figure 3.2-1, reflecting the Greek "Βοσόρ", the name of a city in the Old Testament whose "garments" are "red" (Isaiah 63:1, Septuagint), that is, stained with wine or blood, and therefore impure. This reading, also present in the Latin translation, is not found in any of the Greek manuscripts, which all have "βόρβορον" [filth] instead, obviously a simplification (see Dubuisson and Macé 2003, 307–308). In this case, "correcting" the seemingly strange reading "Bosor" in the Armenian text, to make it conform to the Greek text as it exists today, would have made a likely primary reading disappear from the indirect witness, where that reading is preserved as a kind of fossil.

For the purpose of comparing them with the original works, translations can be divided into two types: *ad verbum* (according to the wording, i.e. literal) and *ad sensum* (according to the meaning, i.e. free; P. Chiesa 1987). The spectrum is continuous between extremely literal (to the point of becoming almost unintelligible; see Forrai 2012, 296) and extremely creative translations. There might be several translations of a given work even in the same language, or subsequent revisions of a given translation, or translations made not from the original directly but from

another pre-existing translation (this is very common in Latin; see e.g. Dolbeau 1989).

### **Example 2**

There are at least two different early Latin translations of the Greek *Physiologus* (an early Christian text moralising animal behaviour, edited by Sbordone 1936; see Pakis 2010 for an excellent *status quaestionis*). One of them (version *C*) exists only in two manuscripts (one of which is the famous *Physiologus Bernensis*; e-codices.unifr. ch/de/list/one/bbb/0318); the other (version *y*) was more widespread (Carmody 1941) and has an extremely large diffusion through adaptations in Latin and in vernacular languages (Henkel 1976; Orlandi 1985). An early mediaeval Armenian translation of the *Physiologus* exists as well, and was in turn translated into Georgian before the tenth century (Muradyan 2005, 5). In this case, the Georgian translation, being preserved in a much older manuscript than all extent Armenian ones, is an important indirect witness for the establishment of the Armenian text. In a review of Peeters (1898), Gottheil (1899, 120) drew a "pedigree of the Physiologus literature" (see fig. 3.2-2 below). Although outdated and now known to be wrong on several points, this diagram provides a good picture of the spreading of this work through many languages and over a large timespan. As defective as it may be, Gottheil's bird's-eye view of this tradition has not been replaced yet; research has made progress on some parts of the diagram, but not on all of them. Except for the Armenian translation mentioned above, the *status quaestionis* is no better today than in Gottheil's time for any of the "oriental" translations, and Carmody's edition (1941) of the Latin texts (of versions *y* and *B*, the latter probably derived from the former) did not really improve our knowledge of the early stages of the Latin tradition. Sbordone's edition of the Greek text (1936) took all known Greek manuscripts into account (and only a few more have been discovered since then), but neglected the ancient translations altogether in its stemma (see fig. 3.2-3) and critical text. Sbordone did, however, consider the Greek indirect tradition, especially a curious work attributed to Eustathius of Antioch (fifth century) and entitled *Commentary to the Hexaemeron* (the six days of creation), edited in a seventeenth-century edition (still the only one existing; *Patrologia Graeca*, 18:707–794). Even though this work is not an exegetical commentary, but probably part of a chronicle, and was not written by Eustathius of Antioch but dates from some time between the sixth and the eighth centuries, it is still valuable as an indirect witness because it quotes, more or less exactly, many passages from the *Physiologus* (see Macé forthcoming). Sbordone was able to locate the quotations from pseudo-Eustathius in his stemma (see fig. 3.2-3 below), but he gave too much credit to manuscript *M* (Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, A 45 sup.), which he believed to be the oldest preserved Greek manuscript. In fact, earlier manuscripts exist (some known to Sbordone) but were at that time wrongly dated on palaeographical grounds; but this is not the real point. According to my own analysis of the tradition, *M* must actually be located rather "low" in the

**Fig. 3.2-2:** Mediaeval translations and adaptations of the *Physiologus* (Gottheil 1899, 120).

**Fig. 3.2-3:** Stemma of the manuscript tradition of the oldest recension of the Greek *Physiologus* (Sbordone 1936, lxxix, redrawn and simplified).

**Fig. 3.2-4:** My own stemma of the *Physiologus* tradition, taking the ancient translations into account (previously unpublished, the Greek letters in lower case represent postulated hyparchetypes).

stemma (see fig. 3.2-4). In critically evaluating this manuscript tradition, the ancient translations, which were made a few centuries earlier than the Greek manuscripts, prove to be crucial. The agreements between the Armenian and Latin *y* translations and the Greek manuscript *Π* (Moskva, Gosudarstvennyj Istoričeskij Muzej, Sinod. Gr., 467, dated to the eleventh century), as well as some more recent manuscripts, on the one hand, and the agreements between the Ethiopic and Latin *C* translations

and the other Greek manuscripts on the other hand, are a very strong argument in favour of a split of the tradition between two main branches (and not four, as Sbordone thought). The differences between these two branches are such that they cannot be explained simply as copyists' mistakes or involuntary interventions; they are traces of the existence of two recensions or redactions (within the oldest recension singled out by Sbordone) very early in the history of the tradition (see fig. 3.2-4). Sbordone's second family ("2a classis" in fig. 3.2-3) cannot be confirmed on the basis of common mistakes, and therefore it cannot be a family at all. Two further manuscripts (*G* and *Va*) can be added to the branch formed by *M* and *Γ*; they are both older than *M* and both from southern Italy (like *M*), thus clearly showing that *M*, which contains many singular mistakes, is but a member of a family of manuscripts which is not situated very high in the stemma.

### **3.2.3 Quotations/(auto-)plagiarism**

In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, texts were "recycled", often without explicitly crediting the original author, sometimes to such an extent that the new work does not contain anything (or not much) else than e x cerpts from one or more previous writers (see P. Chiesa 2012, 381: "gran parte di tale letteratura è compilativa" [a large part of such literature [of the early Middle Ages] is compilatory]). One out of very many examples would be the letters that the monk Jacob Kokkinobaphos addressed to the *sebastokratorissa* Irene around 1040 (edited by Jeffreys and Jeffreys 2009). These letters are actually a *cento*, or a "tapestry of quotations" (Jeffreys 2012), taken from a large number of Greek Church Fathers. As Cassin (2018) has shown, those quotations are an important indirect witness, at least for the history of the reception, but also potentially for the history of the textual tradition, of Gregory of Nyssa's commentary on the Song of Songs. Compare also the case of pseudo-Eustathius quoting the *Physiologus*, as discussed above (3.2.2 – example 2). To provide another similar example from the Latin world, editors of Augustine of Hippo (354– 430) are compelled to make use of Florus of Lyon's (first two thirds of the ninth century) compilations of extracts (Chambert-Protat 2014) because Florus had access to old manuscripts containing Augustine's works which are no longer extant. Yet another famous example is the citation of verses from the *Poetic Edda* in Snorri Sturluson's *Prose Edda* (beginning of the thirteenth century). Sometimes, these verses are preserved only there and not in the direct tradition, represented mainly by a thirteenth-century manuscript, the *Codex Regius* (*Konungsbók*) [Book of Kings], Reykjavík, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum, GKS 2365 4º.

An author may also reuse his own text in different places. For example, in the homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus, nine chapters are shared between homily 38 (on Christmas) and homily 45 (on Easter; Trisoglio 1965). For our purposes, it does not matter if Gregory himself did this or someone else interpolated the chapters of one homily into the other, because these chapters are present in both homilies in the whole tradition. At any event, the same text in one homily can be used as an indirect witness for the other homily (see Dubuisson and Macé 2003, 315–317).

Of a different kind are f l o r i l e g i a, in which longer or shorter excerpts of works are not reworked to form a new work but displayed as such, often with the name of their author, sometimes even with the name of the excerpted work. Those florilegia are organised thematically or alphabetically, and transmitted through a more or less broad manuscript tradition. In Greek patristics, one of the most important of these florilegia is the so-called *Sacra parallela* attributed to John of Damascus (Thum 2018), preserved in several recensions (one manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, gr. 923, is illustrated). When editing such a florilegium, the danger is the same as when editing a translation: that the editor may hypercorrect the text on the basis of the source (De Vos et al. 2008, 179).

In mediaeval c o mmentaries (see 1.2.1), smaller or larger portions of the commented text are quoted, either as a l e m m a or in the body of the commentary, which constitutes another type of indirect witness. The commentaries may be transmitted as works in themselves or as s cholia accompanying the commented work (on mediaeval commentaries and glosses in general, see Copeland 2012). As an example, one can mention the lemmata of Proclus' commentary on Plato's *Parmenides*, which are one of the oldest witnesses, albeit an indirect one, to Plato's text (see 4.5.2). The ancient scholia (from the Alexandrian school or from late Antiquity; see 1.2.1) accompanying the text of Homer or of the Greek tragedies in papyri or in Byzantine manuscripts can help in restoring the oldest layer of those texts (see e.g. the project of an online edition of Euripides scholia: euripidesscholia.org). See also Browning (1960) for the importance of marginal variants and scholia to classical literature sometimes preserved in recent manuscripts.

### **3.2.4 Interpolations**

The term "interpolation" is sometimes used to designate the process of reusing and reworking previous works in a new one, but for this we prefer the term "excerpting" (see 3.2.3). By interpolation we mean the introduction into a text of a portion of text foreign to it. This is different from g l oss-incorporation (see 4.3.2), which is usually unintentional; interpolation normally happens intentionally.

One problem is that interpolations are normally removed from the edited text of a given work (see 6.2.3) as foreign to that work, and might not even be mentioned in the introduction to the edition, and so in this way they remain out of reach for scholars. If the interpolation is interesting, it may be edited for its own sake. For example, a passage present in some manuscripts of homily 38 by Gregory of Nazianzus, which was obviously introduced at some point in the transmission process, has been edited in an article; unfortunately, it was impossible to identify its author (Macé 2004). Some works considered "heretical" by the official Church were preserved only as interpolations in orthodox works (Tuilier 1987).

If the interpolated piece of text belongs to a known work, it can be considered an indirect witness to the corresponding part of that work because it was transmitted outside of it. Unfortunately, such cases are rarely documented. When collating the Armenian text of Pseudo-Dionysius' *Epistula de morte apostolorum Petri et Pauli* (see 4.5.4) in the manuscript Erevan, Matenadaran 993 (a hagiographical-homiletic collection copied in 1456), I discovered that the copyist (or his model) had interpolated into Dionysius' text a passage which belongs to the *Martyrium Pauli*, a secondcentury apocryphal text existing also in Armenian translation and transmitted in, among other manuscripts, Matenadaran 993. The text of the interpolation offers a variant reading (*ew asē pawłos c'neron* և ասէ պաւղոս ցներոն [and Paul speaks to Nero]) which is not found in the direct tradition of the *Martyrium*, where all manuscripts read "and he speaks to Caesar"; as a direct witness to the *Martyrium*, manuscript Matenadaran 993 presents a rather long omission including the passage in question (Calzolari 2017, 637).

### **3.2.5 Adaptations**

Ancient and mediaeval texts were not only often reused; they were also often reworked: abridged (*recensio brevis* or *brevior*); summarised (epitome); expanded (*recensio fusior*); transposed into another genre, typically from poetry to prose or vice versa (paraphrase); rephrased (recension/redaction); and so on (on the Byzantine vocabulary and practice of rewriting, see Signes Codoñer 2014).

Depending on how deep the changes reach, another recension can or cannot be used as a direct or indirect witness to the transmission of the work. The Greek *Physiologus* (see 3.2.2), for example, is known in several recensions: three prose works in learned Greek, one verse adaptation, and one rewriting in "vulgar" mediaeval Greek (Sbordone 1936). Even in the prose adaptations, the text of the oldest recension was so much altered that the other two recensions cannot be used to establish the text of the first one. However, as far as the first recension is concerned, I was able to determine that the Greek tradition and the ancient translations are divided into two main branches, representing two different redactions of the same work. It is therefore possible to use the witnesses of one redaction to polarise some variant locations in the other redaction. For example, the adverb "καλῶς" [well] is present in manuscripts *asΣ* of redaction *β* (see fig. 3.2-4), but omitted in *GMΓO W*. In the corresponding passage of redaction *α*, the same adverb is present. Therefore (unless one supposes a contamination of one redaction by the other), the omission in *GMΓOW* must be secondary, and if this is confirmed by other cases, it points to the existence of a hyparchetype common to these five manuscripts (*Va* is lacunary at this place). Similarly, Godfried Croenen has shown that it is possible to use one (authorial) recension of Jean Froissart's *Chronicles* (fourteenth century) to orientate the stemma of the manuscripts of the main recension (for a short methodological discussion, see Croenen 2010).

### **3.2.6 Paratextual elements**

M a r g i n a l or i n t e rl i n e a r c o r r e c t i o n s or indications of co-occurring variants in manuscripts can be the result either of philological emendation by mediaeval readers or of collation with other witnesses. In the latter case, these variants are sometimes accompanied in Greek manuscripts by γράφεται, "it is written [elsewhere]"; see fig. 3.2-5) or ἐν ἄλλῳ, "in another [witness]". For an example of a thorough collation of the text of a manuscript against another manuscript, lost in the meantime, see section 4.5.2 on Bessarion's (fifteenth-century) corrections to his exemplar of Proclus' commentary on Plato's *Parmenides*. In figure 3.2-6, the tenthcentury copyist of the text (homily 38 by Gregory of Nazianzus, on Christmas) wrote in the margin next to the words "τὸ θεῖον" [the divine]: "ἐν ἄλλῳ τοὺς θεοὺς γραφὲν εὗρον" [in another [manuscript] I found "τοὺς θεοὺς" ["the gods"] written]. Interestingly, this variant is not found in the text of any still-extant manuscript, only in the margin of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, gr. 515 and also in the margin of the codex Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, E 50 inf., one of the two remaining illustrated uncial manuscripts of Gregory of Nazianzus' homilies.

**Fig. 3.2-5:** Sinai, St Catherine's Monastery, gr. 399, f. 115r, marginal note: "γράφεται καὶ τραπῶμεν" [it is also written "τραπῶμεν"].

**Fig. 3.2-6:** Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, gr. 515, f. 124r, marginal note. Source: Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France, gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b107215420/f128.image.r= grec%20515. Image: CC-BY-NC.

In the same way, glosses and other types of marginalia can be used as indirect witnesses: see Buzzoni (2011) for an example of the use of glosses in the study of the *Heliand* tradition.

### **3.2.7 Direct witnesses preserved in other media**

Palimpsests (see 1.2.2) and p a pyri have often preserved works, especially from Greek and Latin literature from Antiquity, which would otherwise have been lost (Reynolds and Wilson 2013, 195–199). The text preserved on palimpsests or papyri is usually fragmentary because the material support may be heavily damaged and because the script has vanished (especially in the case of palimpsests) and may be hard to decipher. Because of this, the texts found in papyri and palimpsests are usually the object of a documentary edition and require a specific methodology (see Gippert 2015).

If they are not unique witnesses, palimpsests and papyri will usually be the oldest direct witnesses to works otherwise preserved. For example, the papyrus codex edited by Capron (2013) contains saints' lives of which there are also manuscripts and ancient translations – this allows a comparison between the fragments of the text preserved on the papyrus and the other witnesses. Because papyrus was a relatively cheaper material than parchment, papyri often preserve types of texts which may be characterised either as *Gebrauchsliteratur* or as documentary in nature (especially with commercial content), or sometimes as "school books" (see Turner 1968). For this reason, and not only because of their age, papyri are potentially very interesting witnesses, precisely because they did not necessarily follow the same "literary" path of transmission as manuscripts. There is an interesting methodological discussion about the place of papyri (the same could more or less be said about palimpsests as well) in a stemma. Collomp (1929) refutes the idea of the "eclecticism" of papyri (a theory according to which papyri would often contain readings from several families of mediaeval manuscripts), arguing that, because they are much older than the manuscripts, the variants they attest may often go back to the archetype or even predate it. The same line of argument was often taken by Irigoin (e.g. Irigoin 1968–1969, 138). In unpublished papers translated by Most, Timpanaro returns to this question as well (2005, 207–215).

Although they are much rarer, g r a f f i t i can also shed light on the history of a text otherwise transmitted in manuscripts. One famous example is the mediaeval (thirteenth- or fourteenth-century) graffito found in a cave near Vardzia (Georgia) containing two strophes from Shota Rustaveli's epos *The Knight in the Panther's Skin*, which is preserved in manuscripts, none of which are older than the sixteenth or seventeenth century (Gippert 2018, 157). Graffiti preserved in Pompeii also offer their share of literary verses and epigrams, for which they are amongst the oldest witnesses (see Milnor 2019).

I n s c r i p t i o n s can also serve as indirect tradition for literary works otherwise transmitted through manuscript tradition. For example, De Simini showed that extracts from two treatises written in Sanskrit (*Śivadharmaśāstra* and *Śivadharmottara*) and known through late manuscripts are quoted in mediaeval works and also known through inscriptions from as early as the eleventh century, much earlier than the manuscripts (De Simini 2016, esp. 237). Conversely, manuscripts can be used as an indirect tradition for existing but damaged or lost inscriptions: in his edition of Byzantine stone epigrams, for example, Rhoby (2014) more than once uses transcriptions of the inscriptions preserved in manuscripts.

### **3.2.8 Using indirect witnesses**

In all the cases mentioned here, the main point of using indirect witnesses is that their text has been preserved "outside" the main tradition; they can therefore be used as an "outgroup" (see 5.2.1, <IP_ADDRESS>) to orientate the stemma and document the early history of the textual tradition and the appearance of (hyp)archetypes. These witnesses should be used with great caution, however, and some of the methodological difficulties inherent to them have been highlighted above. Nevertheless, when they exist, indirect witnesses are indispensable for gaining access to the earliest stages of a tradition because direct witnesses to these earliest stages are usually missing. In this way, they often provide a clue for understanding how the tradition developed from the earliest stages on, and they will often help orientate the stemma, as illustrated in 3.2.2 (example 2 and fig. 3.2-4). Ancient translations are especially important in this respect because they have preserved larger portions of text than other types of indirect witnesses. Unfortunately, translations are not always considered in the process of editing, for reasons that have been explained above (3.2.2). It may indeed be perfectly justified not to make use of indirect translations; but, as a rule, one should never believe that direct witnesses alone are enough, because there is always much to be gained by looking at the indirect tradition of any work.

### **3.3 Transcription and collation**

### Tara Andrews

Once the manuscript witnesses to a text have been gathered and scrutinised for the clues they might give about the transmission history of a text, the individual text instances must be compared so that their similarities and differences may be analysed. This is the phase of textual criticism known as *collatio* (see 2.2, 6.2). In a digital environment, it is increasingly common to separate this phase into two distinct steps, transcription and collation. When the collation is made, a list of variant locations, or in certain cases *loci critici*, can be produced for further analysis. It should be noted that, although stemmatic analysis eventually requires the editor to distinguish significant from insignificant variation, this cannot be done before the texts are compared in the first place; the question of how to make that distinction will therefore not be treated in depth in this section.

### **3.3.1 Definition of terms**

T r a n s c r i p t i o n is the act of transferring a text from one carrier to another. Normally, this refers to a transfer from one medium to another: for instance, the transcription of a recorded speech, or the transcription of a handwritten document into a corresponding digital form. The word may also refer to the textual version, or document, that results from this act. Transcription may also be said to happen in the process of collation if the editor chooses to collate texts without digital assistance (Nury 2018, 109–111). Such collations, however, are not normally considered "transcriptions" in the usual sense of the word.

C ol l a t i o n is the act of comparing different instances of a text; a collation is a document that contains the result of this comparison. A collation can take a number of different forms. Non-digital forms can include marginal notes on a physical version of a text, or a series of tabular records (fig. 3.3-1).

Digital forms of a collation can include a spreadsheet that mimics or extends the non-digital form of tabular collation (normally referred to as an a lignment t a b l e), an XML document (Andrews 2009) or relational database (Robinson 1989) that stores a list of textual variants, or other less commonly used data structures such as the "multi-version document" advocated by Desmond Schmidt and Robert Colomb (2009). The advantage of a digitally stored collation is that, under most circumstances, it can be transformed more or less automatically into an apparatus of variants, an alignment table, or a variant graph (see 3.4) for display and examination. This is true no matter which format has been chosen to store the collation, although the particular mechanics of the transformation will vary.

A variant location arises when different manuscripts show different readings at a point that can be considered "the same place" in the text. Figures 3.3-2a–c show, in each of the various visualisations, an example of a variant location – the point in the collated text where "ἠκριβωκότων" (perfect passive participle of ἀκριβόω, "to make exact or accurate") appears in most manuscripts but an alternative, "ἠκριβηκότων", appears in manuscripts *P* and *S*. Variant locations are the units of change upon which almost all methods for stemma construction operate.

### **3.3.2 Transcription**

One of the first decisions that must be made by the philologist who works with a particular text is to determine the extent to which transcription of that text is neces-

**Fig. 3.3-1:** Example of a tabular collation: Thomas Hoccleve's *Regiment of Princes*, line 4264. Hoccleve Archive, University of Texas Libraries. Image: CC-BY-NC-SA.

**Fig. 3.3-2a:** A print-style apparatus of variants.

**Fig. 3.3-2b:** An alignment table.

**Fig. 3.3-2c:** A variant graph. (The text for all visualisations is from De Vos et al. 2010.)

sary. This decision is usually made on a combination of scholarly-theoretical and practical grounds. As this is a handbook about stemmatology, we will deal here with the transcription of texts that exist in at least three instances, and quite often many more. (A *codex unicus*, or text surviving in only a single copy, cannot have a meaningful stemma; a text that has two instances can have a stemma drawn, but the stemma will not have any further use in the editorial process.) The decisions made about the methods and extent of transcription will, therefore, be a function of the editor's desire to represent and examine the minutiae of variation in each text, the overall length of the text, the number of manuscripts that would need to be transcribed, and the amount of time that is available for the work.

The first choice facing the scholarly editor is: should all texts be transcribed in full? If the use of computer-assisted collation tools is planned, then the answer must be "yes"; if the editors plan instead to collate the texts manually, then they may choose to transcribe only one text in full. This would then become the "b a s e t e x t", against which all other texts are compared. The relative trade-offs of computerassisted vs manual collation will be discussed below, in section 3.3.3.

### **Digital transcription**

Insofar as the vast majority of critical editions produced nowadays are done with the computer in some form, the focus here is on modes of digital transcription. There are several possibilities for how to transcribe a manuscript text; the editor's choice will depend on the later use to which the transcription will be put. Perhaps the simplest option is to make a plain text transcription; this entails typing the text of the manuscript into a text editor or word processor, and saving it in plain text format (see 3.4.5). The primary advantage of this approach is its simplicity. Many philologists, however, will quickly discover that the inability to use more than the most basic formatting becomes more of a hindrance than a help.

At this point, many philologists will be tempted to use the more advanced formatting features provided by word processing software – to change the font size, include footnotes, use colour or superscript formatting to represent additions or deletions, and so on. This must be avoided, unless the philologist intends that the transcription should never be imported into another tool! Hardly any word processor file formats can be read reliably by other programs; if the transcription is to be used further, it would need to be saved as plain text, and the formatting features in question would be lost.

### **Markup languages and markup schemes**

To address this problem, the best solution currently available is to use a markup scheme. By far the most well known of these is the XML scheme provided by the TEI consortium and described in the TEI guidelines (tei-c.org/p5; see also 3.4 below). These guidelines provide a way to describe, in a form that is more or less machine-readable, the vast majority of textual and palaeographical phenomena that occur in manuscript texts. TEI XML has been the transcription format of choice for the vast majority of digital edition projects since the early 1990s, and has a large community behind its use. Users of TEI can also draw on a well-developed ecosystem of tools and programming libraries to parse XML documents, search and query them, and transform them into common online display formats such as HTML, EPUB, and PDF.

XML-based markup of text is justified by the OHCO model – the idea that text can be expressed as an "ordered hierarchy of content objects" (DeRose et al. 1990). The hierarchy imposed by XML syntax is a strict one: a text must be modelled, conceptually, as a branching (but never merging) tree (see figs 3.3-3a–b for an example). A text, for instance, can contain front matter, main body, and back matter; the main body can contain chapters, which contain paragraphs, which contain sentences, and so on.

Source: tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/ the poem in fig. 3.3-3a. Source: tei-c.org/ html/SG.html. release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/SG.html.

**Fig. 3.3-3a:** Example XML markup for a poem. **Fig. 3.3-3b:** Corresponding hierarchy model for

Alongside the increasingly widespread adoption of XML for text transcription came the realisation that the OHCO model is not always entirely adequate to describe a text (e.g. Renear, Mylonas, and Durand 1996). How, for instance, should the scholar deal with a quotation that begins in the middle of a paragraph and continues to the next paragraph? How should a manuscript text be made to fit into a strict hierarchy that its author, or its scribe, had no conception of when the text was written, and would therefore quite often violate? One can imagine, for example, an authorial rewrite of three and a half lines of text that cross a chapter boundary, or an annotation added to the margin of a manuscript that refers to a portion of the text not precisely defined.

These objections to the OHCO model have led some scholars to propose alternative schemes for text markup; perhaps the best known of these is LMNL (Piez 2014), which rejects the idea of a strict hierarchy, allowing arbitrary regions of the text to be annotated without regard to their place in the overall text structure. LMNL is not widely used, however, owing primarily to the lack of the technical infrastructure that makes XML so popular.

### **Normalisation for transcription**

Alongside choosing a format, the next decision that a scholarly editor must make is the extent to which the transcription should be normalised for spelling, punctuation, layout, and so on. Here, the editor places the transcription on a continuum between the idea of a d o cumentary transcription (Pierazzo 2011), in which every feature of the manuscript is represented as faithfully as possible in the chosen medium, and an i n t e r p r e t a t i v e t r a n s c r i p t i o n, in which the text of the manuscript is represented in a way that minimises the differences between versions.

There is no one "correct" level of normalisation to be observed in the transcription phase. The extent to which a text is normalised will greatly affect the possible results of collation and identification of variants, which will in turn have an impact on any stemmatic analysis to be done. If the editor chooses the more labour-intensive documentary approach at the transcription phase, there remains the opportunity to apply normalisation techniques in a later phase of text collation. If, on the other hand, the editor chooses at the outset to produce normalised transcriptions, the collation can never be made to reflect any manuscript variation that was omitted at the transcription stage. In making this decision, scholars should carefully consider their overall purpose in editing the text, as well as any material or time constraints on the project.

### **3.3.3 Collation**

Although the acts of transcription and c o l l a t i o n are often regarded as separate steps in digital workflows for critical editing, many textual scholars regard the collation as a distinct entity in its own right, comprising the text of the individual witnesses and the correspondence between them, inseparable from the acts that go into its creation. The collation is not only the centrepiece of a critical edition of a text, but also what makes any sort of analysis of the transmission of a text possible. Without a collation, there can be no stemma. We therefore need to understand what a collation is and how this might vary depending on context.

In recent decades, the concept of what a collation is has evolved, and varied, according to the aims of the editor whose definition is used and according to the capabilities of the time. Into and beyond the 1960s, one conceived of a collation as a process carried out with reference to a base text, usually some kind of norm such as a published edition (Colwell and Tune 1964, 253). By the early 1990s, perhaps spurred on by the adoption of computer technology, the relative ease of splitting text automatically into individual words based on the spaces between them, and the wide availability of algorithms for pairwise comparison, collation was described as the comparison of "two genetic states or two versions […] of a text" (Grésillon 1994, 242) and something that was done "word for word" (Stussi 1994, 123), albeit still with respect to a reference text. Computational methods allowed this precision to be taken farther still, as is demonstrated by another definition of collation as an act that was carried out "character for character" (Shillingsburg 1996, 134). This definition is striking in another aspect: rather than referring to comparison with a base text, its author calls for the comparison of "all versions that could conceivably have been authoritatively revised or corrected". It is around this time that the notion of the base text ceases to be a central part of the definition of the collation. Later scholars define collation as an act whose purpose is to find agreements and divergences between witnesses (Plachta 1997, 137) or explicitly to track the descent of a text (Kline 1998, 270); they differentiate between collation as a process of comparison (carried out "word-for-word and comma-for-comma"; Eggert 2013, 103) and the result of comparison, which is known as the "historical collation" (Greetham 1994, 4); or they describe collation again as a process, whose result is described simply as lists of variant readings (Greetham 2013, 21).

From these descriptions, it is possible to detect a converging (though also evolving) definition of collation, and a distinction between the act and its result. Collation may be carried out against a reference text, pairwise, or as a many-to-many comparison. The comparison may be done at the word level, at the character level, or at another unspecified syntactic or semantic level, according to the sensibilities of the editor. The question of authority enters the picture with Shillingsburg's definition (1996); this arises more in modern genetic criticism than in classical or mediaeval textual criticism, but conveys the idea that some manuscripts may represent definite departures from the "original", "authorial", or "main" text and that these might therefore be left out of a collation. The purpose of collation is usually given as being the discovery of where witnesses to a text converge and diverge; one might also claim that its purpose is to track the descent or the genesis of a text.

The act of collation produces a result, also known as a collation. Although the term "collation" can be used for the set of data that results from the process in any of its forms (whether that be a spreadsheet based on a copy text, a list of variants keyed on an existing edition, or even a digital object such as a JSON-format alignment table produced by collation software programs), it usually has a more specific meaning. Eggert (2013, 103) uses for this the term "historical collation", by which he means "an extended report" on the substantive variants between the texts. It is important to note here that the historical collation is almost always a curated and pruned version of the results of comparison of the text, a fact to which Eggert also alludes when he writes that the historical collation "is often restricted to […] 'substantives', leaving the now-orphaned commas and other 'accidentals' to look after themselves". In that sense, the collation, as many textual scholars understand it, is a document that reflects not only the "raw" results of comparing a text but also the scholarly work of interpreting these results into a particular argument about the constitution and history of that text.

Here, however, it would be useful to draw a distinction between the collation and the critical apparatus. These things can easily be conflated; for example, Greetham (1994, 4) refers to the *apparatus criticus* and historical collation as a representation of a "collation and the results of emendation". A reader might deduce from this that, for Greetham, a "historical collation" is the *apparatus criticus* of an edition minus any emendations. This is, however, almost certainly a misinterpretation of his words. Whereas a collation is a catalogue of variant readings in a text and may or may not be constructed with reference to a base text, an *apparatus criticus*, as its name implies, is a record of variants that takes the critically established text as its point of reference. In fact, the *apparatus criticus* may restrict itself to those variants judged to be genealogically revealing, that is, "significant errors". Maas (1960, 8) even goes so far to say that only the non-mechanically decidable readings of the archetype, which he calls "variant-carriers", deserve a place in the critical apparatus; in this case, even the substantive readings would be omitted if they were clearly secondary. Since a collation is a necessary prerequisite to the *constitutio textus*, and the *apparatus criticus* is a result of this process, it is clear that they cannot be the same thing. This distinction also serves to explain why, contrary to the expectations of many users of a critical edition, textual witnesses can almost never be reconstructed in full from the edited text and its apparatus.

### **Manual collation**

A collation can, naturally, be made without the use of automated alignment tools. In this case, the scholar will follow the advice of West (1973, 66): write down the differences between each manuscript and a reference text. West recommends the use of a printed edition for this; if no edition is yet in print, the scholar can choose a manuscript copy of the text that seems well suited for the purpose. According to West, the collator should record even apparent trivialities in orthography, as they may be unexpectedly useful in constructing the stemma or otherwise understanding the relationship between manuscripts; this is, in essence, an argument for keeping normalisation to a minimum at the transcription phase. West also recommends including information in the collation about page divisions, scribal or second-hand corrections, and so on.

### **Automatic collation**

In order to use any sort of automated collation software, every manuscript witness needs to be transcribed in full; the software operates on the basis of these transcriptions to identify and align the readings they contain. The author of one of the first well-known text-collation tools was initially taken with "the notion of feeding these manuscripts into one end of the computer, which would then extrude a critical apparatus on the other" (Robinson 1989, 99). His tool, COLLATE, was eventually designed to work interactively and closely with the editor. Robinson included the facility not only to align variant readings, but also to normalise selected readings and to choose the readings that should constitute the edited text, so that the result was not merely a collation but essentially a fully constituted text and its *apparatus criticus*.

The current generation of collation tools, on the other hand, limit themselves strictly to the act of comparison; the authors of the CollateX tool describe collation simply as text comparison and refer to it as a process (Haentjens Dekker et al. 2015, 453). The process of collation around which these tools are based, also known as the collation workflow, is known as the "Gothenburg model" after its definition there at a workshop in 2009. The workflow is composed of discrete steps – tokenisation, normalisation, alignment, analysis, and visualisation – which, taken together, form the process by which a scholarly collation artefact is generally produced.

Tokenisation refers to the subdivision of a text into discrete units suitable for comparison. Normally this is done word for word, but depending on the language, structure, or grammatical rules of a text, the units might comprise multiple words (e.g. "et cetera", "sine qua non") or, on the other hand, might split words apart (e.g. "filio-que").

Normalisation refers to the decision, for each token in the text, about whether to compare it to other tokens in its precise literal form, or whether to treat it as being a version of another known word for the sake of alignment. If spelling normalisation was not incorporated into a transcription process, it is often done here. Other examples of normalisation include the use of morphological analysis tools such as stemmers (which produce the root stem of a word, so that, for example, "give" and "given" are recognised as corresponding readings), the conversion of spelled-out numbers into their modern numerical equivalents (e.g. representing both "fortytwo" and "XLII" as "42"), or the use of sound-value software such as SoundEx to account for shifts in spelling (as in Birnbaum 2014). It is important to realise that, in terms of automatic collation, the purpose of this normalisation is *not* to produce a canonical version of each reading, but merely to provide hints for a better alignment of the variant texts.

A l i g n m e n t is the meat of an automatic collation process, whereby the (normalised) tokens of each text are compared with each other, and a proposal is produced for how they correspond to each other. The result of an alignment most often takes the form of a table, as described above; it may also take the form of a variant graph (see below).

 A good visualisation of results allows for a meaningful analysis, which is the scrutiny of a proposed alignment by the textual scholar. The purpose here is to evaluate the overall correctness of a given alignment. A scholar may choose to adjust the approach taken to tokenisation or normalisation until a satisfactory alignment is produced; alternatively, the scholar may wish to use the alignment as a starting point for producing a satisfactory collation without rerunning the automated steps.

### **Manual vs automatic collation**

The choice of automatic or manual collation is a topic on which most scholars will eventually develop strong preferences, as well as strong opinions on which is faster or more efficient. In the case of automatic collation, the bulk of the work is in transcription of the source witnesses – a task that for some edition projects is too daunting to contemplate, but is perfectly feasible for others. Depending on how normalisation is handled during the transcription process, the collation workflow steps described above usually progress very rapidly once the transcriptions are finished. The use of automatic collation has two advantages: first, that the scholar emerges from the process with detailed transcriptions of each manuscript witness, and second, that there is no need to preselect a base text for comparison of witnesses. This allows for an easier and more flexible construction of an *apparatus criticus* in the final edition.

For manual collation, on the other hand, the bulk of the work is in the meticulous comparison and alignment of, and record-keeping about, a succession of witnesses. In practice, a manual collation must be done with reference to a base text chosen for the purpose at the outset. The scholar must therefore be very sure of the suitability of the chosen base text; once the collation has begun, a change of base can mean the repetition of an enormous amount of work. Moreover, with manual collation there can be an increased incentive for the scholar to speed up the process by disregarding the advice of West and omitting variation that is deemed to be trivial. This is particularly true for edition projects where full transcriptions were considered to be impractical, since a manual collation is essentially a codified form of normalised transcription. Insofar as a collation is meticulous and complete, it is possible in theory to reconstruct individual witness transcriptions from the collation itself; however, any variation omitted from the manually produced collation cannot be reconstructed at a later stage.

Where the text is unusually long and the number of its manuscripts is unusually large, as with, for instance the *Divina Commedia* of Dante (see the discussion of overabundant traditions in <IP_ADDRESS>), an alternative to collating the full text is to select a certain number of *loci critici* (see 3.3.4 for a full definition) which are considered representative of the manuscript tradition and which will be used as the basis of comparison and stemma creation. In order to use this method successfully, the editor must be able to justify the selection of particular passages; for this, it is necessary to have a thorough and detailed grasp of the text, its manuscripts, and the sorts of variation they display.

### **3.3.4 Variant, variant location, and** *locus criticus*

When a collation has been made, the scholar is left with information on where the witnesses to the text can be seen to differ, and what those differences are. A text, as carried in a particular witness, can be thought of as a series of r e adings – that is, a series of lexical units that are the reader's interpretation of the marks upon the page. An individual reading is often equivalent to a word, but in certain contexts might be multiple words (see the discussion of tokenisation above), or in other contexts might be suffixes (e.g. "-que"). Since each reading has its particular place in the text sequence in a given witness, each reading can be thought of as having a location.

To collate a text, then, is to align these sequences of readings. Once that is done, the collation (particularly in its form as an alignment table) contains an overall sequence of locations and, for each location, a set of readings that occur in that

**Fig. 3.3-4:** A variant location as represented in a graph. This location includes corrections made by the scribe at the time of copying; the state of the text before these corrections has been denoted with the abbreviation "a.c." (*ante correctionem*). In this example, witness *E* has been corrected from "καταλύσαντι" to "κατακλύσαντι", and witness *Q* from "κατακλείσαντι" to "καταλύσαντι".

**Fig. 3.3-5a:** A variant location with a lemma specified (here as "Basistekst").

location across the collated witnesses. When this set contains more than one reading, those readings are known as v a r i a n t s, and the place where they occur is their variant location (see figs 3.3-4–3.3-5). The discovery and definition of these locations is key to the establishment of a stemma, no matter the method used for the stemma construction. The set of variant locations is the information, deriving from a collation, with which a stemmatic analysis is done.

Depending on the methods adopted for stemmatic analysis of the text, the editor may designate a subset of these variant locations to be *loci critici*: those places in the text where the variation is believed to betray information about the copying (i.e. text-genealogical) relationships between the manuscripts – that is to say, those places that show "significant" variation – and on which construction of the stemmatic tree should be based (see 2.2.5, 4.3.1). In some cases (see 3.3.3) the *loci critici* will be chosen prior to collation; they can also be chosen based on the results of collation, either of the whole text or of samples from it.

Whatever means is chosen to create the stemma, the editor will eventually use it to work through all variant locations in the text and make a choice about which (if any) of the extant readings should become part of the critical text (see 6.2 for a fuller description of this process). This reading will be designated as the l e m m a, and from that point on the term "variant" will refer specifically to the readings at the given location that differ from the lemma.

While most textual variation represented in a collation will concern the set of variants at a single location within the text, there are a few sorts of variation that comprise multiple locations. One common example of variation across locations is

### **172** Tara Andrews

**Fig. 3.3-5b:** The same variant location as represented in an *apparatus criticus* (highlighted).

textual repetition, for example when a scribe copies the same line of a manuscript twice in a row. As another example, when a reading has been moved in the text relative to other manuscripts, we speak of t r a ns p o s i t i o n. Some editors, however, refer to this as t r a n s l o c a t i o n; for them, transposition refers only to the situation where two readings have been swapped with each other. That is, given a base text that reads:

The **white** cat played with the dirty ball,

an example of translocation would be:

The cat played with the dirty **white** ball,

and an example of "true" transposition would be:

The dirty cat played with the **white** ball.

Editors may also speak of i n v e r s i o n, which is when the transposition involves two contiguous words, for example if one manuscript reads "ἑστῶσα βοτάνη" where the others read "βοτάνη ἑστῶσα" [grass standing].

The question of how to represent transposition (or translocation) adequately in a collation is a complex one. For the case where the transposition or translocation is not a simple inversion but is still relatively isolated (i.e. it comprises only one or a few contiguous readings), it usually suffices to add a row to the collation table (assuming one is collating manually). The collation software CollateX can also attempt to detect and mark translocations in its output, which works reasonably well for small and isolated cases. However the collation is rendered, the presence of a transposition will usually lead to overlapping entries in the resulting *apparatus criticus* in order to accommodate variation within the component readings as well as the transposition itself (see figs 3.3-6a–c).

In general, if the text to be collated includes substantial dislocation of text, the resulting collation – and the resulting apparatus – can quickly become very intricate and complex, especially if the editor also wishes to note variants of individual readings within the dislocated segment. One strategy is to collate these segments in a separate table and indicate in the main collation where this segment is located, in which witnesses, with reference to the rest of the text. If the editor is using auto-

**Fig. 3.3-6a:** A transposition as rendered in a CollateX result graph. Note that the words "βέλος ἐστὶ" [is an arrow] appear twice.

**Fig. 3.3-6b:** The same transposition marked in a tabular collation. Note the need for the reading "βέλος" [arrow] to appear in both collation rows.

**Fig. 3.3-6c:** The same transposition represented in an *apparatus criticus*.

mated collation tools, it is often a good idea in any case to break the text into discrete logical segments, as the collation results improve markedly. If some of these segments are dislocated in some witnesses, a record will need to be kept of the respective order of collated segments across all witnesses.

Additions to, and omissions from, a text are also spoken of in reference to a variant location. These arise from the situation where, at a particular location, certain witnesses have no reading at all. In the absence of a base text and before the establishment of at least a preliminary stemma, it is impossible to label the missing readings as omissions, or conversely to label the readings that do exist at that location as additions. The terms a d d i t i o n and o m i s s i o n therefore gain their meaning only when a particular reading at the location (or, indeed, the absence of a reading there) is given some form of authority. Moreover, in the particular case of additions and omissions, the added or omitted text is usually considered a single reading, no matter its size (see fig. 3.3-7).

**Fig. 3.3-7:** An example of a reading that has been either added or omitted. The editors eventually chose to regard this as an addition (which is not expressed in the graph).

### **3.3.5 Normalisation for collation**

Given the wide variety in ancient and mediaeval orthography, a full and exact collation of diplomatically transcribed witnesses will often show a great deal of variation that does not seem to impact the sense of the text; this may include spelling variants, abbreviation marks, accents, or variant letter forms. While in some cases, for instance in mediaeval works such as the *Hildebrandslied* (Baesecke 1945) where the dialect is itself an object of study, the editor may wish to retain every orthographical detail, in other cases the editor, or the reader, would prefer to reduce the amount of variation to be dealt with. In this case the editor will subject the text to a second process of n o r m a l i s a t i o n, which usually involves the substitution of a reading with a canonically written form of that reading. The obvious challenge, then, is to define what constitutes "canonical" in each particular situation. The particular conventions will depend as much on the text in question and the degree to which differences must be scrutinised as on the history and norms of the language and writing system that is employed in the text.

For the purposes of publication, the editor will usually choose a single set of orthographical conventions to use; each reading that is recognised as carrying the same text will then be written in the same manner. For example, the article written as "τον" in a manuscript may be given its usual accent and be rendered as "τὸν" in its normalised form; spelling will also be normalised. It follows naturally from this that the question of whether two readings carry the same text is in most cases up to the judgement of the editor. For example, if the two readings "κρίνεται" and "κρίνετε" are seen, which are both forms of the verb κρίνω, "to separate; to choose", the editor may choose to regard the second as a spelling variation of the first, given the context of the surrounding sentence and the fact that the pronunciation of αι and ε in Greek had already stopped being distinguishable in the classical period. On the other hand, it is also possible to conclude that, since these are two distinct recognisable conjugations of κρίνω (third-person present singular middle/passive indicative and second-person present plural active indicative, respectively), one should not be normalised to the other.

For the purposes of stemmatic analysis, entirely separate rules for normalisation may be needed. Here, we come back to the advice of West to note even apparent trivialities; it may be that a peculiar spelling or abbreviation of a word, or even a strange shape of a glyph, turns out to explain the emergence of an otherwise inexplicable copying error in the textual tradition and thereby shed light on the stemma, even if it is correctly interpreted in a different branch of the tradition. An example of sorts can be found in book 25 of the *Speculum historiale* of Vincent of Beauvais; the vulgate printing of 1624 (Vincentius Bellovacensis 1624) erroneously numbers as "Cap. CXIX" a chapter which is marked merely as "C.XIX" in its manuscript exemplars but is indicated more clearly as "Capitulum XIX" in other witnesses (e.g. Roma, Archivium Generale Ordinis Praedicatorum MS XIV.28b). It is, strictly speaking, debatable whether this error constitutes a significant one in the Lachmannian sense, and it concerns a reading that is almost paratextual in nature, which an editor may well be tempted to skip altogether in the collation; nevertheless, it does reveal some information concerning the textual transmission. Textual scholars will thus, in their analysis, often want to take into account variation, such as spelling, peculiar orthography, or even ink highlights, that is unlikely to be desired in a printed apparatus. To complicate the matter even further, some automated collation tools provide a string substitution feature so that a given string can be collated in place of the reading itself. This is also referred to as "normalisation". For example, given the two sentence fragments "the lazy dogs" and "the lazy sleeping dog", the user of a collation tool will want to ensure that "dog" aligns with "dogs", and may achieve this by normalising both words to "dog", "ANIMAL", or even "NOUN".

It is usually at the normalisation stage that editors must confront the question of how to handle p unctuation within the text (see also 4.3.4). This first requires an answer to the question of whether punctuation marks should be regarded as readings in their own right, or simply as aids to the interpretation of the words and sentences they accompany. The latter point of view provides many editors with the justification necessary to discard entirely (or almost entirely) the punctuation of the manuscript witnesses once it has played its role in the interpretation of that witness's readings; punctuation is then reintroduced in the finished edition based on the conventions that modern readers expect (see 4.3.4). If, instead, punctuation is treated at the level of readings (either as independent reading tokens or combined with the readings it accompanies), then it too must at some stage undergo normalisation, and the considerations set out here concerning normalisation of readings in general also apply.

### **3.4 Data representation**

### Joris van Zundert

These days, as an editor, it may be hard to avoid the use of computers altogether. Even scholars aiming exclusively at a printed book edition will usually prepare such an edition using a computer. When inferring a stemma, the use of computers becomes even more likely. If a textual scholar opts to use digital tools for this, once direct (3.1) and indirect (3.2) witnesses have been found and collated (3.3), the resulting data needs to be represented and stored in a digital environment. Computational stemmatological analysis requires variant information as input and results in various kinds of output. Both input and output information can be represented in various digital forms. This section provides an introduction to the more technical sides of dealing with digital data representing texts available in different versions: the make-up and pros and cons of various digital data formats that scholarly editors may encounter when they start working with computational means and digital methods. The actual critical study of the textual variation, often leading to a critical edition, will follow in the next three chapters.

### **3.4.1 A tiny history of the genesis of storing text as digital data**