stemma
stemmaThe 'family tree' of manuscripts, showing which copies descend from which, used to reconstruct an earlier text in a critical edition.
Where this term appears
- The Search for the Original Treatise
By grouping the witnesses according to their shared errors you can build a family tree, the stemma codicum , the lineage of the copies, descending from a lost common ancestor.
- The channel and the algorithm Treatise
There is no apparatus, no stemma, no collation of the printed versions against each other, let alone against manuscripts.