Soru

In the mid-nineteenth century, the German classical philologist Karl Lachmann formalized a genealogical approach to textual criticism, known as stemmatics, designed to reconstruct lost ancestral texts from surviving, corrupted manuscript witnesses. Central to Lachmann’s methodology was the strict division of the critical process into distinct, sequential stages, chief among which was recensio—the exhaustive collation and classification of textual variants across all extant copies. Lachmann posited that significant scribal errors, rather than shared correct readings, provided the decisive evidentiary basis for establishing genealogical relationships among manuscripts. Because independent copyists were extraordinarily unlikely to introduce the exact same idiosyncratic error spontaneously, shared errors (conjunctive errors) demonstrated descent from a common ancestor, whereas unique errors (separative errors) proved that one manuscript lineage could not have served as the direct exemplar for another.

Once these error distributions were systematically mapped into a genealogical tree, or stemma codicum, the critic could deploy the operational principle of eliminatio codicum descriptorum. Under this procedural rule, any manuscript demonstrably derived entirely from another surviving witness was excluded from the final editorial apparatus, as its presence contributed no independent evidential weight toward reconstructing the archetype—the earliest recoverable text at the root of the surviving tradition. Lachmann maintained that by applying algorithmic voting rules based on stemma topology to resolve conflicting variants at each ancestral node, the editor could successfully eliminate subjective aesthetic preference from the initial reconstruction of the text.

Nevertheless, Lachmann’s method encountered severe complications when applied to open textual traditions characterized by horizontal transmission, commonly termed contamination. Contamination occurred when a scribe, rather than faithfully reproducing a single exemplar, consulted multiple discordant exemplars simultaneously and conflated their readings into a single composite copy. This practice produced hybrid witnesses with multiple parents, fundamentally violating the tree-like cladistic assumptions of stemmatics and obscuring clear lines of vertical descent. Furthermore, early twentieth-century medievalists, notably Joseph Bédier, observed that stemmatology exhibited a pervasive practical defect: an overwhelming majority of constructed stemmata possessed exactly two primary branches. Bédier contended that editors unconsciously favored bifurcating models because a two-branched stemma, when divided evenly between competing readings, inevitably forced the editor to adjudicate variants based on internal plausibility, thereby reintroducing the very subjective editorial discretion that the genealogical method purported to eliminate.

According to the passage, the principle of eliminatio codicum descriptorum dictates that a manuscript should be excluded from an editorial apparatus if which of the following conditions is met?