Lachmann, Bédier and the Bipartite Stemma : Towards a Responsible Application of the Common-Error Method

摘要

Since Joseph Bedier published, early in this century, his startling discovery that the vast majority of stemmata determined by the common-error method is bipartite, scholars have attempted to explain the situation either by the circumstances of transmission or, as did Bedier, by the faulty application of the method by editors. Some scholars were aware that parallel multipartite descent and the eliminatio codicum descriptorum depended on the absence of, respectively, cunjunctive and separative errors. They refused to see, however, that the acceptance of such stemmata will almost certainly lead to the elimination of potentially true readings, to such an extent that the validity of the entire method is impugned. Hence all stemmata constructed on the basis of textual evidence alone must be bipartite. They will not show the true genealogical relationships of the witnesses, but will, instead, schematically depict the descent of the text from the archetype to the surviving witnesses via demonstrable hyparchetypes ; and at best they will permit eliminatio lectionum singularium.