Stemmatics ● "Copies introduce changes" ● Developed along with religious and legal exegesis (e.g. "witnesses") ● Mutation traditionally seen as bad ○ "truth" of the archetype ○ "changes" are "errors" to be removed ○ "purity" and "contamination" ● Scientific discipline developed in the same cultural framework of evolutionary biology and historical linguistics ○ Karl Lachmann (1793-1851) ○ Joseph Bédier (1864-1938) ● Adoption of phylogenetics has been slow ○ "New stemmatics" (Bordalejo 2006; Robinson 2016) ○ "éloge de la variante" (Cerquiglini 1989) First actual stemma (Schlyter and Collins, 1827)
Learn stemmatics in one minute! Scheme of descent of the manuscripts of Pseudo-Apuleius' Herbarius by Henry E. Sigerist (1927) (Source: "Textual Criticism", Wikipedia)
Text in evolution ● Easy to find analogies with biology and linguistics (e.g. admixture) ● Copying manuscripts is hard ○ Copyists didn't even necessarily understand what they were writing! ● "Agency" of changes and of reconstructions ● Manuscripts are not static ● Changes are not necessarily independent ● Hard polytomies are real, common and expected "Christine de Pizan in her study" in Cent Ballades. British Library, Ms. Harley 4431, f° 4.
Divine Comedy ● One of the most successful medieval works ○ More than 600 complete manuscripts ○ Canterbury Tales at 80 (inc. incomplete ones) ● Written between 1306-1321, circulating before conclusion ● Read and copied by speakers of different varieties ● "Tradition" characterized by intentional "contamination" ○ The case of Boccaccio ("divina") ● "Errors" already in the oldest dated manuscript (Landiano, 1336)
Critical tradition ● First scientific approach by Barbi (1891) ○ 400 loci critici (~ SNPs vs. whole sequencing) ● Casella (1921) proposed the first tree(s) ● Petrocchi (1965) published the most important edition ○ Excludes everything that might have been influenced by Boccaccio ○ Stemmatic, but also practical reasons ● Sanguineti (2001) proposed a new tree ○ Collatio of the full text, but only seven manuscripts ○ Rb and Urb have a new placement ● Shaw (2011) contrasts Sanguineti with a digital edition and phylogenetic analyses
Critical tradition ● First scientific approach by Barbi (1891) ○ 400 loci critici (~ SNPs vs. whole sequencing) ● Casella (1921) proposed the first tree(s) ● Petrocchi (1965) published the most important edition ○ Excludes everything that might have been influenced by Boccaccio ○ Stemmatic, but also practical reasons ● Sanguineti (2001) proposed a new tree ○ Collatio of the full text, but only seven manuscripts ○ Rb and Urb have a new placement ● Shaw (2011) contrasts Sanguineti with a digital edition and phylogenetic analyses
Critical tradition ● First scientific approach by Barbi (1891) ○ 400 loci critici (~ SNPs vs. whole sequencing) ● Casella (1921) proposed the first tree(s) ● Petrocchi (1965) published the most important edition ○ Excludes everything that might have been influenced by Boccaccio ○ Stemmatic, but also practical reasons ● Sanguineti (2001) proposed a new tree ○ Collatio of the full text, but only seven manuscripts ○ Rb and Urb have a new placement ● Shaw (2011) contrasts Sanguineti with a digital edition and phylogenetic analyses
Critical tradition ● First scientific approach by Barbi (1891) ○ 400 loci critici (~ SNPs vs. whole sequencing) ● Casella (1921) proposed the first tree(s) ● Petrocchi (1965) published the most important edition ○ Excludes everything that might have been influenced by Boccaccio ○ Stemmatic, but also practical reasons ● Sanguineti (2001) proposed a new tree ○ Collatio of the full text, but only seven manuscripts ○ Rb and Urb have a new placement ● Shaw (2011) contrasts Sanguineti with a digital edition and phylogenetic analyses
Many questions ● Can we reproduce Petrocchi's tree with Bayesian analysis? ○ Can we support it by using the entire text instead of the 400 loci? ● Can we support Sanguineti's tree, especially the relationship between Urb and Rb? ● Can we reproduce Shaw's findings with Bayesian analysis? ● Is there evidence for an independent tradition for each cantica? ● Can we start building a pipeline for: ○ Incorporating more manuscripts of the Divine Comedy? ○ Studying other works? Papyrus 52 (oldest fragmentary manuscript of the New Testament)
Data and analysis ● Collecting and expanding data from Shaw's edition ● 34 taxa ○ 6 (+1) witnesses ○ layers of correction independently coded ○ 3 critical editions (Petrocchi, Leonardi, Sanguineti) ● 94,782 characters (34,417 sites, 1,487 patterns) ● Most characters with either a single state or two states ○ Not considering orthography ○ However, in some cases over 10 states ● Initial exploratory analyses with Neighbor-nets; Bayesian with BEAST2 ○ Only seven main manuscripts / all witnesses ○ The entire text / each cantica independently ○ 400 loci / the entire text
ASR is hard(er) ● In the first canto (NEXUS character I_01_048_7), the author describes a terrifying she-wolf walking towards him a. parea che l'aere ne temesse ("as if the air afraid of it [=the she-wolf]") b. parea che l'aere ne tremesse ("as if the air was shaken by it [=the walking]") ● Experts' consensus is that it is a "facilitation" of the original, employing the Latinism tremere (Italian has tremare) ○ Common principle of lectio difficilior potior (the most difficult state is the strongest) ○ Used by the author elsewhere (e.g. Letter VI, 24, and Rime IV.1-2, where the air is "shaken by a person walking") ○ Literary critics agree that it fits the tone much better
Higher goals ● Problem of the Synoptic Gospels ● Evolution of religious texts in light of history. For example, in earlier manuscripts: ○ Mark ends with the death of Jesus (Mark 16:9-20 not found) ○ Luke 23:34 ("Forgive them, for they know not what they do") is missing ○ Paul's injunction to women to be "silent" and "subordinate" (1 Cor 14:34-35) is missing
References ALAGHERII, Dantis (2001). Comedìa. Edited by Federico Sanguineti. Firenze: Edizioni del Galluzzo. ALIGHIERI, Dante (1994). La Commedia Secondo L’antica Vulgata: Introduzione. Edited by Giorgio Petrocchi. Opere di Dante Alighieri v. 1. Firenze: Le Lettere. BORDALEJO, Barbara (2006). Modern Genetic Methods: the New Stemmatics. http://www.textualscholarship.org/stemmatics/index.html. Accessed on December 4, 2019. CERQUIGLINI, Bernard (1989). Éloge de la variante: histoire critique de la philologie. Aux Travaux. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. HOWE, Christopher J.; CONNOLLY, Ruth; WINDRAM, Heather F. (2012). “Responding to Criticisms of Phylogenetic Methods in Stemmatology.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 52 (1): 51 – 67. LEONARDI, Anna M. C. (1991). “Introduzione.” In La Divina Commedia. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. MACÉ, Caroline; BARET, Philippe V. (2006). “Why Phylogenetic Methods Work: the Theory of Evolution and Textual Criticism.” Linguistica Computazionale 24: 89 – 108. ROBINSON, Peter (2016). “Four Rules for the Application of Phylogenetics in the Analysis of Textual Traditions.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 31 (3): 637 – 651. SHAW, Prue (2011). Commedia: a Digital Edition. Birmingham: Scholarly Digital Editions. TROVATO, Paolo; TONELLO, Elisabetta (2016). “Premessa ai saggi di edizione e di commento di Inferno XXXIV.” Commedia (2). Padova: Libreriauniversitaria.it.
Thank you! Main findings so far: ● Phylogenetic analysis supports Shaw (and Petrocchi) more than Sanguineti ○ But it is not so clear-cut ● No support for an independent tradition of each cantica ● Loci critici seem to perform better than random selections of equivalent size ● Evolutionary models are not suitable out-of-the-box ○ Date-calibration can worsen the results ● Probabilities of substitution might depend on character as well as value
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