Dear Mark,

I am working on a French medieval text (Froissart's chronicles). The situation seems to be as follows. The author composed his text, and then a number of years later he wrote a different version of the same text. The differences between the two versions are localised in particular chapters which he seemed to have rewritten from scratch, probably using his notes rather than the earlier version of his own text. Other chapters, however, remain the same from one version to the next. 

I don't want to go into the detail of all this, and I do understand there are problems (i.e. scribes may accidentally introduce the same sort of variant as those introduced by the author himself in his second draft; there may be contamination, with scribes using witnesses from the different versions, etc.), but if we simplify the situation we can say that we have for those chapters that have not changed between versions, two independent text traditions, each going back ultimately to the author's originals. It seems indeed reasonable to assume that the author's original of his second version, for those chapters which he did not change, was directly based on the original of his first version (and there are of course various possibilities of how this could have worked and what these originals could have looked like).

The interesting thing is that this situation may help with the study of the variants for those chapters that have not changed from one version to the next. Correlations between readings in witnesses of those two versions are indeed likely to be explained by descent from a common ancestor (i.e. the author's original, whether of the first or the second version). What that means is that when I as a philologist am reconstructing the stemma on the basis of the variants I find, I may not have to prove that one reading is an "error" (and therefore younger) and another reading is correct (and therefore more likely to be original), which is often very difficult to do. If I can find amongst the variants a reading that is shared between the two versions (i.e. is contained in some of the witnesses of both versions), then that is probably the original reading, and all other readings are therefore likely to be innovations (whether errors or not).

Best,

Godfried


> -----Original Message-----
> From: The list of the European Society for Textual Scholarship and the
> Society for Textual Scholarship
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mark Bland
> Sent: 17 September 2009 22:50
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: stemmatology and authorial versions
> 
> Dear Godfried,
>   Perhaps my problem is that you do not specify the period of
> text you deal with, or the level of complexity, and so my first
> instinct is to suspect you are looking for a shortcut. As someone
> who deals with seventeenth century manuscript texts, I don't see
> what the problem is: the simple fact is that authors revise and
> that, therefore, stemma are both horizontal as well as vertical:
> the problem is to distinguish between process and transmission.
>   Cheers,
>   Mark
> 
> Dr Mark Bland
> Senior Lecturer, English
> Centre for Textual Studies
> De Montfort University
> Leicester LE1 9BH
> (44)-(0)116-2078379
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: The list of the European Society for Textual Scholarship and the
> Society for Textual Scholarship on behalf of Croenen, Godfried
> Sent: Thu 17/09/2009 16:55
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: stemmatology and authorial versions
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I am trying to get some relevant methodological literature on a
> situation which I am dealing with and which must occur quite regularly
> in textual studies, although in the few handbooks I have looked at I
> found no discussion of this specific case.
> 
> A lot of criticism of the Lachmannian method has focused on the
> problematic status of the "common error", i.e. how do scholars know
> that a variant is indeed an error, why do scholars think the author's
> text did not contain errors, how can we be certain that a correct
> reading has not been corrected by the scribe and is therefore younger
> then the 'error', why should we not use variants that are not errors,
> etc.
> 
> In a tradition where we have two or more authorial versions of an
> author's text, there may to an extent be a methodological way out of
> this impasse, which would allow scholars to use variants without
> worrying whether or not the variants are proper 'errors' and even
> whether or not they are 'significant' (i.e. whether or not they are of
> such a nature that it would be difficult for scribes to make the same
> error independently, or change the error back to the original reading
> without having access to a witness of the original reading).
> 
> The argument goes as follows. If at a point in a section of the text
> which is contained in both redactions/versions of the text, the textual
> tradition has more than one reading, then the variant shared by
> witnesses of the two redactions is likely to be the one that is
> original. Indeed, each of these witnesses goes back to an archetype
> which in turn is derived from the author's (two or more) originals.
> Since it is likely that the author's second (third) original, or the
> later stages of his original manuscript were based on his first
> original or on the earlier stages of his original, then the variant
> transmitted to the witnesses of both (or more than one) version of the
> text is likely to go back to the author's original(s). Therefore, the
> fact that the variant appears in witnesses of both redactions is in
> itself significant and in many cases enough to accept that this is the
> original reading (and therefore 'correct', although not in the
> Lachmannian sense). This means that, as long as one can find variants
> which occur in witnesses of both versions, one does not need to (and
> maybe should not) worry about which is the correct and which is the
> faulty reading because one can with a fair amount of certainty
> establish which reading is original and which is a variation on the
> original.
> 
> The argument is of course not entirely unproblematic (what with the
> changes in the author's successive versions, what the tendency of
> scribes to simplify readings, etc.), but I hope you get the gist. I
> would be grateful for any pointers towards either theoretical
> discussions of this issue, or to examples of where
> editors/stemmatologists have (successfully) used this sort of argument
> in their reconstruction of textual filiations.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Godfried Croenen