Which Stemmatics?
Recently I received a very long e-mail requesting some clarification regarding the way in which Peter Robinson and I have described the New Stemmatics in different publications.
This scholar thought that our ideas about the New Stemmatics appeared to be new and that they differed from the Stemmatics she was familiar with. Her questions were all interesting and insightful and showed that she had carried out a thorough research on our writings. What surprised me was that she had not come across any of the other contemporary approaches to the genetic study of texts. Indeed, in Holland and Germany many refer to these new approaches as “Stemmatology,” in Spain they are generally referred to as “Neo-Lachmannian” approaches.
It was also interesting to confirm, that the scholarly perception -of non-specialists- of the Lachmann method is clearly filtered through the very loose interpretation by Paul Maas (Textual Criticism, 1958). The notion that this method attempts to recover an authorial original is imprinted in people’s minds. It is more accurate to say, that the Lachmann method did not attempt to recover an authorial original, but instead proposed to reconstruct the archetype of the tradition –there is a big difference between these. The New Stemmatics does not even attempt to reconstruct an archetype; instead, it tries to construct “the latest, well-informed, link of that textual tradition: a text that could potentially explain all extant texts at a given point in time, but that does not aspire to be ‘authorial’ or ‘definitive.’” (from a paper presented at the 2005 DRH conference).
The idea of an edition produced following New Stemmatical principles is to present the text in such way that it helps the reader to understand the textual tradition and all the variation at a particular point.
So, I guess that when it comes to what a scholar thinks about Stemmatics, we have to ask: which stemmatics?