] present itself as a method analogous (or even complementary) to
stemmatics." Peikola, "Aspects," 28.
On the subject of Iberian music in non-Iberian sources, Martin Ham traces the complex
stemmatics and manifold stylistic issues of a Rex autem from Georg Rhau's 1538 Symphoniae jucundae, suggesting that Portuguese versions may be closest to the original piece, which may have been Spanish in origin.
(3) He considered
stemmatics to be "mechanistic textology." (4) Likhachev's edition, which used the Laurentian manuscript as a copy text but in a normalized format, became the standard working edition of the PVL for early Rus' studies.
"Petrucci's Type-Setters and the Process of
Stemmatics," 250-51 and passim; and "Printed Music Books of the Italian Renaissance from the Point of View of Manuscript Study," esp.
Barbrook, Christopher Howe, and Matthew Spencer, '
Stemmatic Analysis of Lydgate's "Kings of England": A Test Case for the Application of Software Developed for Evolutionary Biology to Manuscript
Stemmatics', Revue d'histoire des textes, forthcoming.
First is the organic assumption that not only does a text beget a text (the useful, though dangerous, foundation of
stemmatics), but that a text can only be begotten by a text--that it would have been unlikely or impossible for Chaucer to have created the phrases in "Sir Thopas" without direct visual scrutiny of a pre-existing exemplar.
For Kay the phrase's Dantean authenticity is confirmed by the work of Ricci and Shaw in establishing a manuscript stemma in which all witnesses contain it, allowing us, according to the rules of
stemmatics (which, Kay remarks in an uncharacteristically bilious aside, "[a]nyone dealing with classical and medieval texts knows--or ought to know," xxiii), to be confident that it was also in the archetype and, behind that, in the autograph as it came from Dante's hand.
The apparently strict operation of the
stemmatics is at odds with the instability of the conjecture.
That the ancestor of the Hereford family of maps goes back at least to the fifth century is a conclusion demanded by the basic
stemmatics of the manuscripts.
44 For an earlier identification of the different typesetters involved in the production of a music book, see Stanley Boorman, 'Petrucci's Type-Setters and the Process of
Stemmatics', Quellenstudien zur Musik der Renaissance, i: Formen und Probleme der Uberlieferung mehrstimmiger Musik im Zeitalter Josquins Desprez ('Wolfenbutteler Forschungen', vi), Munich, 1981, pp.
Jim Samson (University of London), Niels Krabbe (The Royal Library, Copenhagen) and Morten Christophersen (University of Oslo) all reported from ongoing editing projects--the Complete Chopin, the Carl Nielsen Edition, and the Johan Svendsen Edition repectively--and demonstrated the full range of challenges, from the dizzying details of
stemmatics, over sketchbook riddles, to the hardships of funding.
In the introduction by Connolly and Mooney (which provides a clear synopsis of the essays), the editors argue for the primacy of manuscript study: "Linguistics, dialectology,
stemmatics, palaeography, and codicology all make important contributions to the study of the literature, over and above--or, more rightly, before--the critical studies that one undertakes for literary works of all periods." The veracity of this statement is fully proved by the essays in this volume.