Goal is the reconstruction of the original
The thing to be remembered in our description of the MS. and in all our collation is that our aim must be to find out
the readings and the character of the original MS. from which our MS. was copied. The textual emendation of an author
becomes a hopeful thing as soon as we are able to classify the MSS. of the author, to say that so many have all been
copied from one archetype, so many from another, so many from a third, and so on; when we can reduce the host of
existing MSS. of the author to two or three groups, and determine from the readings of the individual MSS. the text
of the two or three archetypes from which they have all come. The number of fifteenth-century MSS. of our author
may appear unwieldy at first, but it is possible in time so to manipulate them as to elicit from them the readings of, let
us say, three ninth-century MSS. which have been lost to us, but which we can reconstruct, as it were, can put together piece
by piece, from the traces which the later MSS. supply. And that is where the advantage appears of minute collation, of
noting each and every divergence or peculiarity of a MS. In tracing the pedigree of a MS. these minutiae are extremely
helpful. The mere similarity of text is not sufficient of itself to enable us to tell that one MS. has been copied from
another. But if a peculiarity in the reading of one can be explained from some little accidental circumstance of another,
such as the cases mentioned on p. 65, we have tangible proof of the connexion of the two. The safest rule to follow in
collating a MS. is therefore to take note of as much as our time will permit, to deem unworthy of notice as little as
possible. The fact that a scribe first wrote
at, then immediately
corrected it to
et (p. 122 above) may, for example,
indicate some peculiarity of his original, whether that the
form of its
a was like an
e, or that it had
at corrected in the
margin or elsewhere to
et, or that its reading was
at, while
et
is an emendation due to the scribe of the copy. It may equally be due to a mere clerical error that has no such significance.
