The Genealogy of Texts: Manuscript Traditions and Textual Traditions

For some time, scholars have been using computer-assisted methods to produce graphic representations of the relationships between witnesses within a textual tradition. ¹ The use of methods originally developed by evolutionary biologists has been called into question on account of the perceived lack of identity between two different disciplines. This view arises from a misunderstanding about how the methods work in relation to texts and how the resulting stemmata should be interpreted. This article refines textual critical terminology, particularly the distinction between textual traditions and manuscript traditions, in the context of the use of computer-assisted stemmatological methods to further our understanding of how these fit within the wider theoretical framework of textual criticism and scholarly editing, and makes explicit the way in which stemmata produced by using evolutionary biology software should be read.