Stemmatology

Neo-Lachmannian Philology

1. Neo-Lachmannian philology, sometimes also called “neo-lachmanni(ani)sm” (cf. Salemans 2000, Blecua 2002, Trovato 2014) on the basis of  the Italian term "neo-lachmannismo", is an ambiguous label. In fact, it may refer either to an interpretation of the Lachmannian method that works with “variants” rather than with “errors” in general (see below point 2), or to the Italian philological school which, starting from Pasquali, gave a particular turn to the Lachmannian method. This school is also named “variantistica” or “nuova filologia” after Michele Barbi (Fraistat, p. 74), although it has nothing to do with the so-called “new philology”; further labels are “translachmannism” and “postlachmannism”.

The latter is a school of thought that tries to widen the historical dimension of the Lachmannian method by carefully studying the specific textual tradition of each witness, instigated by Bédier's criticism. As a consequence, recensio (including collation and the drawing of a stemma) is kept almost as it was in the original method, while the step of the constitutio textus allows for more freedom: the editor is supposed to proceed differently for different kinds of traditions. For instance some lectiones singulares (which were all discarded in the traditional Lachmannian method) may be recovered for the critical text in a second stage, if the history of the tradition permits to provide evidence for them to belong to the original. The critical edition is seen as a scientifically based working hypothesis, not as an absolute entity. This methodology was mostly developed by Italian scholars in the 20th century (cf., among others, Buzzoni/Burgio 2014; Pugliatti 1998). 

References

– Blecua, Alberto. 2002. “Defending Neolachmannianism: On the Palacio: Manuscript of La Celestina”. Variants 1: 113–133.
– Buzzoni, Marina, and Eugenio Burgio. 2014. "The Italian ‘third way’ of editing between globalization and localization." In Internationalität und Interdisziplinarität der Editionswissenschaft, edited by Michael Stolz and Yen-Chun ChenBerlin-Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 171–180.
– Fraistat, Neil, and Julia Flanders, eds. 2013. The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
– Pugliatti, Paola. 1998. "Textual Perspectives in Italy: From Pasquali’s Historicism to the Challenge of ‘Variantistica’ (and Beyond)." In Text. An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies, vol 11, edited by W. Speed Hill, E. M. Burns, P. Schillingsburg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 155–188.
– Trovato, Paolo. 2014. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann’s Method: A Non-Standard Handbook of Genealogical Textual Criticism in the Age of Post-Structuralism, Cladistics, and Copy-Text. Foreword by Michael D. Reeve. Firenze: Libreriauniversitaria.it edizioni.

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2. In the second sense, the term is more loosely and more generally used (mostly by non-Italian scholars) to denote a method that proposes to use all variants to discover proximities between witnesses, and the resulting (often: computed) tree is orientated only in a second step. Henri Quentin may be seen as the ancestor of this approach, which was soon computerized in several ways. After him, Anthonij Dees, Evert Wattel, Karl-Heinz Uthemann and Ben Salemans may be cited, in other words the school of Amsterdam: see the contributions in van Reenan et al. 1996. This method was especially meant to be used in heavily contaminated traditions represented by many witnesses (such as the Bible).

While the first method (the one strictu senso) sticks to the differentiation of stemmatic and non-stemmatic variants (cf. Leitfehler), the second may forego this distinction, be it for theoretical reasons of inapplicability in heavily contaminated texts, be it for the sake of ease of computerised handling.

References

Salemans, Ben J.P. 2000. Building Stemmas with the Computer in a Cladistic, Neo-Lachmannian, Way: The Case of Fourteen Text Versions of Lanseloet van Denemerken. Nijmegen: Nijmegen University Press.
– Trovato, Paolo. 2014. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann’s Method: A Non-Standard Handbook of Genealogical Textual Criticism in the Age of Post-Structuralism, Cladistics, and Copy-Text. Foreword by Michael D. Reeve. Firenze: Libreriauniversitaria.it edizioni.
– van Reenen, Pieter Th., and Margot van Mulken, eds. 1996. Studies in Stemmatology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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