tekstfamilies

tekstfamilies, or text families, is a term used in textual criticism and philology to describe a group of manuscripts that share a common textual tradition and descend from a common exemplar. Members of a tekstfamilie typically exhibit a consistent set of readings, variants, or scribal habits that distinguish them from other groups, allowing scholars to trace lines of transmission and scribal practice across manuscripts.

The concept helps scholars clas sify and study how a text was copied and altered over time. Boundaries between families are not always sharp, because scribes often copied from multiple sources, incorporated popular readings, or corrected texts from other manuscripts. As a result, a single manuscript can show mixture or affiliations with more than one family. A key goal is to reconstruct the likely original text by weighing the evidence from different families and their variants.

Tekstfamilies are established through methods such as stemmatics, which builds a family tree (stemma) of manuscripts based on shared readings and errors. Analysts compare variant readings, examine copying practices, and consider external evidence like ancient translations or quotations. In practice, labeling may refer to well-known groupings within a text tradition, such as recognized families in New Testament textual criticism or other classical and medieval corpora.

Limitations include later editorial contamination, partial surviving witnesses, and ambiguous affiliations. Some scholars emphasize broader “text-types” or clusters rather than rigid families. Despite limitations, tekstfamilies remain a useful framework for understanding textual transmission and guiding reconstruction of a text’s history.

See also: textual criticism, manuscript, stemma codicum, text-type, edition history.