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?
I wonder: how is
different from the “archetype,” which I have always understood to be the most recent common ancestor of all surviving witnesses? It sounds the same to me. Lachmann never claimed to be resurrecting the authorial or definitive text — at least in his classical texts — did he?
Moreover, how is the “New Stemmatic” edition different from the “old stemmatic” editions in wanting to present “the textual tradition and all the variation at a particular point”? The stemmatic editions I have on my shelves from, say, the 1940s, seem plenty interested in helping me understand the textual tradition and all the variation at a particualr point. Perhaps the difference is technology? But the theory sounds the same.
Comment by Erick Kelemen — December 16, 2006 @ 3:46 amIt seems to me that I explained the difference between the New Stemmatics and its construction of the latest text in a tradition in my original post. However, I will try to make it clearer. Following a the New Stemmatics in constructing a text, the editor acknowledges that his final edited text is the newest text in the textual tradition, that is, the exact oposite of the archetype –which you corrrectly define as the common ancestor of all surviving witnesses. The archetype is a hypothesis about a text from a time before the extant witnesses. The New Stemmatical construction is a text that exists based and thefore can only be the result of the existence of the extant witnesses.
I never attributed to Lachmann the idea of the resurrection of an authorial text, instead I pointed out the fact that there is a widespread confusion about the Lachmann method, mostly generated by Maas’ book.
It is difficult to give an opinion about unnamed editions. The critical editions that I have worked with in the past have the tendency to present only evidence that the editor deems to be of interest to the reader and that the publisher accepts to include. They were not able to present all the variation at a particular point, although the editors might have wanted to.
The difference between the New Stemmatics and classical stemmatic methods is indeed a very subtle one, but just because it is subtle that does not mean that it is non-existent. Matthew Spencer, several years ago, observed the best criticism that I have heard of our method: that it was possible that a text produced using New Stemmatical principles might be the same as one using more traditional approaches. My answer was that although his suggestion is a theoretical possibility, the path that leads us to a solution is as important as the solution itself.
Comment by bbordalejo — December 20, 2006 @ 5:32 pm