ENGL371 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Google Books
Document Summary
Gathering of witnesses and identify patterns, group them into families and from those families form hyponchetypes. This family tree of books is called a stema lemma/lemmata -- apparatus; bit of the text that is concerned. Eclectic: textual critics who make eclectic editions are picking and choosing variants among witnesses. You are creating a text that never previously existed. Copy text: hybrid between genealogical editing and eclectic editing. Look at witness, pick criteria, choose what copy text will be. In doing this you pick the one text that for you represents the closest thing to the lost original. Straying from the copy text is allowed because it is eclectic. If there is a crux you can extrapolate from other witnesses. Accidentals vs. substantives (ww says editor must stick to copy text in terms of accidentals) he is interested in doing something systematic, but involving editorial judgement. Make a stemma, identify relationships between variants, but you use your best judgement.