The Genealogy of Texts: Manuscript Traditions and Textual Traditions ............................................................................................................................................................ Barbara Bordalejo 5 KU Leuven, Faculteit Letteren, Belgium ....................................................................................................................................... Abstract For some time, scholars have been using computer-assisted methods to produce graphic representations of the relationships between witnesses within a textual 10 tradition. 1 The use of methods originally developed by evolutionary biologists has been called into question on account of the perceived lack of identity between two different disciplines. This view arises from a misunderstanding about how the methods work in relation to texts and how the resulting stemmata should be interpreted. This article refines textual critical terminology, particularly the 15 distinction between textual traditions and manuscript traditions, in the context of the use of computer-assisted stemmatological methods to further our under- standing of how these fit within the wider theoretical framework of textual criticism and scholarly editing, and makes explicit the way in which stemmata produced by using evolutionary biology software should be read. 20 ................................................................................................................................................................................. 1 Introduction The distinction between the concepts of textual trad- ition and manuscript tradition is central to our understanding of how stemmatological software 25 works and what its limitations are. The history of stemmatology is the story of a series of exercises in the use of quantitative methods, sometimes paired with qualitative methods, to analyse textual traditions. To study manuscript traditions requires more than 30 the quantitative analysis of variants, as I explain below, and relies on extra-textual elements that add a further dimension to our understanding of the text. It can be argued that computer-assisted methods are just the latest chapter in the history of stemmatol- 35 ogy. However, there have been strong objections to the use of computer-assisted stemmatic analysis. Some of these objections arise from a misapprehen- sion about how the software works, while others flow from a fundamental fallacy which assumes that trad- 40 itional ‘hand-made’ stemmata are closer to the his- torical reality involving the transmissions of texts in manuscripts. The root of this misunderstanding is the failure to distinguish textual traditions and manu- script traditions. This failure gives rise to an expect- 45 ation that an analysis solely based on textual data (the textual tradition) might yield results that are equiva- lent to an analysis that includes textual and extra- textual data (the manuscript tradition). In this article, I answer both kinds of objections and, with examples 50 from three different textual traditions, explain how to read and interpret computer-generated stemmata before drawing conclusions. In order to take advantage of computer-assisted stemmatic analysis, one first must understand how 55 it works and why and in what it differs from non- computational approaches. As a further step, one must be able to correctly read and interpret the computer-generated stemmata. 2 A Brief History of the Stemmatic 60 Approach Before the invention of the movable type printing press, texts were transmitted either by copying from Correspondence: Barbara Bordalejo, Faculty of Arts, Blijde Imkomststraat 21, Faculteit Letteren, KU Leuven, Leuven 3000, Belgium. E-mail: barbara.bordalejo@ kuleuven.be Digital Scholarship in the Humanities ß The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EADH. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 1 of 15 doi:10.1093/llc/fqv038