Stemmas

Stemmas (singular: stemma) are diagrams that depict the proposed genealogical relationships among textual witnesses of a work — for example manuscripts, fragments, or versions. They are used in textual criticism to visualize how readings and texts might have been transmitted from an original to later copies.

Stemma codicum is built by comparing variant readings to reconstruct clusters of witnesses that share a common ancestor, the archetype. The root of the stemma represents the hypothesized urtext or archetype; the leaves are surviving witnesses.

Contamination is a common issue: a scribe may copy from more than one exemplar, producing a manuscript that inherits readings from multiple lineages, complicating the tree-like model; modern analyses may use network approaches to represent these mixtures.

History and use: The method originated in the 18th–19th centuries with scholars such as Lachmann, Griesbach, and Wettstein, and remains a foundational concept in classical philology and biblical textual criticism, though digital methods now supplement traditional stemmatic analysis.

Limitations: stemmas are hypotheses dependent on surviving witnesses and assumptions about transmission; they may not capture all complexities of how texts were copied. As such, stemmas are used alongside other methods to establish critical editions.