The first What is 'The New Stemmatics'?
One may summarize the key characteristics of the 'New Stemmatics' as follows:
- Analysis aims to obtain as comprehensive a view as possible of the relations among the witnesses
- Analysis is based, as far as possible, on all data
- Quantitative tools, typically computer-based, are employed in the analysis
'New stemmatics', accordingly, favours no particular editorial perspective. Some new stemmaticists try to reconstruct putative originals, others rejoice in textual variety. Far from being a flight from thought, these methods challenge our understandings.
This site aims to provide, firstly, a basic orientation for those curious about this new approach to an old problem (bibliography) and, secondly, access to sets of data suitable for use in exploring different approaches to stemmatics (data).