Paolo Trovato has alerted me to an interesting article just published in the latest Storie e linguaggi by one of his doctoral students, Federico Marchetti. The article grows out of his doctoral work and considers manuscripts of Dante that have known exemplars (Abschriften in NTTC terms). In the course of studying these, he addresses the use of singular readings as a way of determining scribal habits. This method has had its critics over the years (e.g., Strutwolf, Jongkind, myself, and now Hixson). Marchetti also criticizes it given his own results because it includes false data. Here is his conclusion:If Po [the exemplar] had been lost, and if we had decided to investigate the scribal behaviour of Est [the copy] according to the Colwell method (that is, by calculating the percentage of textual agreement with the rest of the surviving manuscript tradition), we would necessarily have considered the scribe of Est responsible both for his own errors (which affect 0,06% of the verses) and for those that are ascribable to earlier stages of the tradition (which affect 17,6% of the verses). It is evident that such a diversity in approaches leads to a dramatic discrepancy in outcomes and their degree of reliability. Applying the Colwell method, we would certainly talk about a “scribal version” or “scribal revision” in this case, but – as we have just seen – the copyist of Est is in fact a very diligent scribe, careful about the formal features of his model as well as about its substance. In conclusion, the data collected bear out the necessity of making use of the genealogical-reconstructive method; more in general, they advocate the validity of the Neo-Lachmannian approach.What I didn’t see in Marchetti’s article is a recognition that Royse, for example, fully recognizes this limitation or that Royse incorporates these false positives under his rubric of “the complex scribe.” But, as I have argued in my own work, the problem of deducing scribal habits from singular readings can’t simply be solved by appeal to the complex scribe since most scribally-created readings are not singular at all. I suspect part of the issue here for Marchetti is that he is after a different goal than determining principles of transcriptional probability (Colwell’s main goal). The NT, of course, is highly contaminated which is why Lachmannian approaches, whether neo- or not, have generally not been used.
In any case, my thanks to Paulo for alerting me to this essay. The entire issue will be of interest to our readers and can be found online here with abstracts.