University of Virginia Library

III

The difficulties confronting the "bibliographical" editor who insists on trying to determine the relationship of manuscripts as opposed to texts have been eloquently summarised by Dearing:

There is much weight to these objections, as there was in the advice given to Columbus on the quayside that he must expect to endure hunger, thirst, hardship, mutiny, shipwreck, disorientation and an ever present risk of toppling over the edge of the world. But Columbus, being unfashionable enough to believe that truth might be sought through the study of the physically and historically actual as well as from speculative symmetries, proceeded with his voyage, and editors are, in my view, best equipped to deal with problems arising from irregular agreement when they consider them not merely as logical anomalies (though this is also their duty) but as a challenge to understand the operations of a particular human mind engaged in the act of copying at a particular moment in history. For, as Vieth has pointedly stated, "the bases of textual criticism are just sufficiently mathematical to tempt the critic to set up for a scientist, and just sufficiently nonmathematical to make this temptation an insidious trap."[28] The method of ranking variants which has just been proposed is designed to admit a bibliographical perspective into the preparatory stage of stemma-building by proposing criteria for selecting those variants most likely to have remained stable in transmission and for eliminating those which are likely to be unreliable as evidence for the descent of manuscripts. The criteria in their present form are admittedly crude and may in some instances still produce misleading data—which would be all the more misleading for its having been selected "by rule." They certainly do not relieve the editor of the need for an unceasing alertness towards all the possibilities inherent in all his evidence and the obligation to test all available techniques for making sense of it. It must also be conceded that the method can only be effective when variants are relatively abundant: there would be no point in restricting one's attention to a selection of the more "reliable" variations when this would not provide sufficient evidence to permit the full determination of the stemma.

The first step towards the construction of a stemma is to distinguish between those variants which stand at the conclusion of lines of relationship, and which are called terminal, and those which lie on lines or at

the intersection of lines and which are known as intermediaries. Terminal texts are revealed by their possessing unique readings which show in the form of what Greg called type-1 variations, e.g. ACDEF:B. The final determination of intermediary status rests on more subtle tests, but a text which contains no unique readings is at least a possible intermediary. There are, however, two situations in which the editor may be misled. The first is where a text is in fact terminal but does not reveal this through the possession of an unique reading. The second is where a text which is genealogically speaking an intermediary possesses unique readings which were not transmitted to its descendant or descendants and which therefore show as type-1 variations. A simple situation in which this might happen would be when a carelessly written manuscript introduced errors of an obvious kind, some of which were removed conjecturally by the scribe of a copy. It is therefore clear that readings of a kind that would be prone to such reversal (and especially those in categories E and V) are of lower value as evidence for either terminal or intermediary status than more inherently stable readings. The issues are simpler in this case than in the later stages of stemma construction in that the editor is only concerned with the question of whether the scribe of one of the manuscripts containing the majority reading could have had the odd-manuscript-out in front of him as his exemplar but felt impelled to emend, either because of familiarity with the alternative reading or because the reading as it stood was obviously unsatisfactory. When anything in the nature of the minority variant suggests that such a reaction might have been possible (obtrusiveness in the first case, suspiciousness or outright badness in the second), the editor should be cautious about relying on its unsupported evidence in determining terminal status.

A simple way of handling this problem when considering a large number of sources is to give each unique reading a reliability rating on a scale from nought to two, where 2 indicates a variant, which, in the light of the criteria suggested earlier, would seem to be exceptionally reliable as an indication of terminal status, 1 a variant which is reasonably plausible and not too obtrusive, but no doubt, like all unique or at least rare readings (for it is possible that the singleton variant may have existed in a number of now lost manuscripts), must have been in some measure of danger from memorial contamination, and o a variant that must be considered to have run a real danger of reversal at the hands of an alert scribe. The precise setting of these values will need to be a matter for the editor concerned; however the aim should be a situation in which a single 2-class variant with support from one other of lower status, three 1-class variants or five or more o-class variants should provide acceptable evidence for terminal status and any text

with less support be reserved for reconsideration when evidence is available from the larger groupings.

The next and most challenging stage in stemma-building is the determination of the distributional relationships implied by the type-2 and complex variants. Here the problem is to ensure that the variants chosen as the basis for analysis are, as far as can be determined by purely notional methods, those most likely to give an accurate indication of the underlying genetic groups.[29] In order to ensure this, the following procedure is suggested. To begin with, the editor works through each of his variant readings, studies it carefully in relationship to its context and then assigns it to one or another of the suggested classifications (PIO, SBU, E etc.). In doing so he is in the position of a bidder submitting sealed bids in advance of an auction at which he is also to be the auctioneer, and there may at a later stage be a strong temptation to change the terms of the bid in order to accommodate an emerging pattern of agreement.[30] This, however, would be to defeat one major advantage of the method which is to remove the danger of rationalisation after the event by demanding an assessment of variants at a stage before an overall pattern of relationship has begun to suggest itself. So that the method can be used with as much integrity as possible, and so that evidence can be assembled to permit an assessment of its validity as a method, it is suggested that the judgments should be made first independently and then in consultation by at least two scholars, and that later reassessments should only be made with the agreement of both. It is, of course, possible at this stage that agreement over the precise status of a variant might not be possible. In particular, there are situations where a PIU-type variant, which would theoretically have the highest reliability ranking, may be hard to distinguish from a slightly firmer-than-normal V-type variant. In this case, the variant could be given a double ranking and classified initially either at the higher or the lower ranking depending on whether variants were in short supply or not. If it was necessary to use it for the first stage of calculation, it should be watched carefully, and could be reclassified if it was observed to be setting up otherwise insoluble patterns.

In other cases, however, editors should be prepared to stand by their preliminary evaluation except in situations when a reclassification would be justified by clear considerations which had previously been overlooked, or when a process of reasoning back from an emerging stemma to prior classifications could be justified in Humphrey Palmer's

terms as being spiral rather than merely circular.[31] Fundamental to the use of qualitative methods in textual criticism is the recognition of the point at which, in each particular case, they cease to yield valid answers. To attempt to apply them beyond that point is to devalue not only the editorial enterprise but also the methods. It must also be recognised that the use of such methods is not a substitute for the disciplined and intricate logical procedures described by theorists such as Palmer and Dearing (assuming, of course, that the editor is convinced of their validity as procedures) but a way of supplementing, sharpening, and, where necessary, correcting them.

The selection of which classes of variants to use in the construction of the hypothetical non-directional stemma will depend on the numbers of variations available within each class. The ideal situation would be one in which PIU variants only required to be considered; but, as it is also vital that the variants selected should permit as full as possible a determination of the stemma, it will often be necessary to content oneself with eliminating those classes most likely to contain positively misleading evidence about the composition of genetic whole groups, namely E and V (though E-variations will still, as explained earlier, provide a valuable control on assessments of the truth of groups). If a shortage of higher-ranking variants means that all except the lowest-ranking groups have to be included, the number of inconsistent agreements requiring to be located by formal means may be dauntingly high. However, if some formal technique of resolving inconsistencies, such as Dearing 'ring-breaking' routine, is employed, it should be regarded as absolutely essential that its determinations should be checked at every stage against the qualitative judgements established during the initial process of classification, and, in cases where there was any conflict between the two, a fresh assessment of the contextual evidence undertaken. As an additional guide, I would recommend that every textual scholar should adorn his study with two historical illustrations —the first of the Charge of the Light Brigade as a reminder of the fatal consequences of entry into the wrong branch of a multi-branched fork, and the second of the last stand of the Old Guard at Waterloo as a testimony to the inadvisability of breaking rings without the very best of reasons. At the third stage of stemma-building, when directional evidence is required, it will of course be sought for through the entire body

of variations, bearing in mind that those classified as indifferent under the present terminology may still be directional.

The danger in eliminating variants from consideration because they are of a type that may lead to irregular agreement is that one can easily at the same time suppress variations containing valid and unique evidence of some particular aspect of the genetic relationship. In order to compensate for this, the establishment of a hypothetical stemma should be followed by a testing of its power to make sense of the whole body of variations, including those rejected from the original investigation because of their possible unreliability. A precise methodology for this cannot at present be proposed, but the general rule that should be borne in mind is that, if we have determined the actual pattern of descent, the predominant body of agreements should be in accordance with it and those that are not should be explicable by means of one or other of the principles considered earlier. The presence of a certain level of completely unaccountable variation in a "living" text (as Quentin has used the term)[32] has perhaps to be allowed for, at least among the lower-grade variants; but for a stemma proposed for a tradition of any complexity to receive assent, it must, at the very least, explain.

The assumption behind the present study has been that in dealing with moderately contaminated traditions it should be possible to determine bibliographical genealogies by applying Greg's methods of analysis to variants selected on a prima facie basis as unlikely by their nature to be involved in irregular agreements. The criteria proposed are in some ways a refinement on Greg's own words of advice for dealing with what he terms "correctional conflation":

It is necessary to bear in mind, however, that the efficacy of the method will decline as the number of irregular agreements rises and that, for the radically conflated traditions with which Dearing and Okken are principally concerned, such a stemma, even if determinable, might not be of much help in restoring the readings of the archetype.