ABSTRACT
Stemmatology, or stemmatics, studies the genealogy and evolution of texts. On one hand, stemmatological study may result in fresh evaluations of the textual evidence of individual copies, manuscripts, or printed works, and thus shed new light on their history. On the other hand, and more importantly, stemmatology aims to equip scholars with the best possible hypotheses about the textual tradition studied, and its development and dissemination. Today, stemmatology is a thoroughly multidisciplinary approach, often characterised by the application of computerised tools. The main principles of how most of these computational tools function fall roughly into four categories, as is discussed in the entry. Three approaches, RHM, Leitfehler, and CBGM, are introduced. The most central challenges and dominant advantages are then remarked on in brief. Computer-assisted stemmatology brings together several scholarly disciplines sharing a common challenge: to understand and reconstruct textual transmissions, which were invariably subject to scribal modification, accidental and deliberate. The most obviously associated discipline is textual criticism.
