Stemmatic Textual Criticism

Stemmatic textual criticism, the method codified by Karl Lachmann and given its classic formulation by Paul Maas in 1958, reconstructs the lost original of a work transmitted in many handwritten copies. Because every act of copying introduces errors, manuscripts that descend from a common defective ancestor share those errors. Maas's insight is that shared errors, not shared correct readings, reveal genealogy: by grouping witnesses according to the significant errors they hold in common, the critic builds a stemma codicum, a family tree of manuscripts rooted in the archetype. M. L. West's 1973 handbook turned these principles into working editorial practice for Greek and Latin texts, including the scriptures transmitted in those languages. The pipeline runs from collation through error analysis to a reconstructed archetype that can be defended reading by reading.