Quantitative Stemmatology and Open Recensio: A Test Case on the Bible historiale's Book of Exodus

This paper examines the contribution of quantitative stemmatology to a medieval tradition marked by a Pasqualian open recensio. Eight witnesses of the Bible historiale transmitting the book of Exodus were encoded in TEI, with an apparatus recording lexical, syntactic, morphological and macro-structural variation. From this encoding, genealogical variant locations were extracted and modelled in R. The experiment evaluates how computational methods interpret a stratified and contaminated tradition and compares the results with Bénédicte Michel’s qualitative hypotheses for Genesis. Preliminary analyses reveal stable clusters crossing redactional phases and show where modelling supports philological iudicium and where the tradition resists mechanical reconstruction.