Henri Quentin (Saint Thierry, 1872 – Roma, 1935) was a Benedictine monk and a specialist of hagiography and of history of the Church, he was responsible for the Pontifical Commission for the Revision of the Vulgate. In the field of textual criticism, he is known for the invention of a method in which the manuscripts are compared in small groups of three, in search for intermediaries. In a first step, the manuscripts are grouped on the basis of their variants' agreements. The notion of “error” is used only in a second step: to orientate the sequences of manuscripts. He invented the method of “zéro caractéristique”: if two manuscripts have 0 agreements against a third one, then this third manuscript must be either an intermediary between the two or their common ancestor (cf. Salemans 1996, 12-13, n. 18).
By Quentin
– Quentin, Henri. 1922. Mémoire sur l'établissement du texte de la vulgate. Rome: Desclée.
– ———. 1926. Essais de critique textuelle (ecdotique). Paris: Picard.
On Quentin
– Salemans, Ben J.P. 1996. “Cladistic and the Resurrection of the Method of Lachmann: On Building the Stemma of Yvain”. In Studies in Stemmatology, edited by Pieter van Reenen, and Margot van Mulken, 3–70. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.