Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The study of multiple surviving versions of the same text with the aim of reconstructing a lost original.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the humanistic discipline that attempts to reconstruct the transmission of a text (especially a text in manuscript form) on the basis of relations between the various surviving manuscripts (sometimes using cladistic analysis)

Etymologies

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Examples

  • I tend to think that only people doing stemmatics and philology get it right because no claim to the "right" reading can be confirmed or rejected.

    Butterflies and Wheels » Latest News 2010

  • Indeed, it has not borrowed its concepts from classical stemmatics or even from phylogenetics in biology, which have been tested and found to be robust over many different applications.

    Evangelical Textual Criticism 2009

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