The Philologist's Stone. The Continuing Search for the Stemma

Thinking of the stemma one should try to avoid thinking of a tree and its branches. The few disparate textual witnesses that we do have are often nothing more than a small pile of twigs and branches, of which we will probably never know where in the tree(s) of transmission they had their place. Lachmann’s method, the stemmatological approach in textual criticism is the other extreme, as it promises its adepts a beautiful tree, even if many of the branches remain invisible forever.