ONCE AGAIN ON TRIPARTITE TRADITIONS [ANCORA SULLE TRADIZIONI TRIPARTITE]

The author discusses the thesis put forward by Paolo Chiesa (in this journal, vol. XXVII [2020], pp. 1-42), which relates to the impossibility – at the level of textual-critical theory – of demonstrating the existence of traditions with three or more branches. The article first focuses on the more far-reaching question of the nature and function of errors which, when considered individually, are less or not significant. It then recalls the differences between the criticism devoted to the texts of the Greek and Latin classics (which are the subject of Paul Maas’ Textkritik) and the scholarship dedicated to other traditions (viz., the Middle Latin heritage). Relying on the latter two motifs as a starting point, the author illustrates how the demonstration of the tripartition (or pluripartition) is similar to the demonstration of the bipartition for a manuscript tradition and, above all, how the former differs from the latter. The tripartition of a tradition is in fact manifested through the exclusion of the bipartition – namely, through the demonstration of an absence of errors which would oblige us to conclude that the number of variant-carriers (in the Maasian sense) are not three, but only two. In the final part of the article, the author quotes a passage taken from Paul Collomp’s handbook La critique des textes (1931) where it is suggested that it is far more difficult to prove the absence of a link between two witnesses than its presence between them. This is a passage that Maas must have called to mind when he proposed his definition of the concept of separative error and ascertained its relevance, together with the concept of conjunctive error, for proving in the simplest way the principal stemmatic types.