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Computer-Assisted Methods of Stemmatic Analysis

In this essay, we review the methods of computer-assisted stemmatic analysis available to the Canterbury Tales Project. 1 Our belief that these techniques will permit us to arrive at a more exact reconstruction of the history of the Canterbury Tales than could Manly and Rickert (1940) is vital to our decision to undertake this work. There are two major strands to these techniques. The first, cladistic analysis, is used to gain a rapid overview of the broad relations among the manuscripts. The second, database analysis, is used to refine conclusions about the exact relationships of particular manuscripts and groups, on the basis of scrutiny of individual variants and their distribution. In addition to discussion of these techniques, we briefly report here the results of our testing of these tools on the Wife of Bath’s Prologue manuscripts, among other materials. Cladistic analysis The collation of the manuscripts of a large medieval vernacular tradition yields enormous amounts of information concerning the agreements and disagreements among the manuscripts, even after regularization of spelling. Collation of transcripts of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue manuscripts by the computer collation program Collate, during preliminary studies for the Canterbury Tales Project, supplied around 13,000 separate substantive variant readings among the forty-six manuscripts collated. With each variant occurring in an average of fifteen manuscripts, this gives about two hundred thousand separate items of information to be examined. Multiply this by all the manuscripts, then by all the parts of the Canterbury Tales, and we have a quantity of data far beyond the capacity of manual sorting techniques. Indeed, it appears that the inability of Manly and Rickert to devise any means of coping with this flood of information lies behind their failure to arrive at a genetic reconstruction of the manuscript tradition useful for editorial purposes. 2 The difficulty of reconstructing manuscript stemmata, and the highly structured character of the data that result from collation, have suggested to a number of authors that computer-assisted techniques might prove valuable in pointing quickly to possible relationships which could then be thoroughly examined by other means. 3 The most successful and appropriate of these methods is cladistic analysis (from the Greek clados ‘branch’). This technique has been developed over the last thirty years by researchers in the field of systematics, the branch of evolutionary biology which specializes in the