Practice question · True or false
If forty manuscripts agree on a reading and two disagree, the reading of the forty is established beyond doubt.
Hints
- Ask where the forty came from.
- Manuscripts descended from one bad copy count as one witness, not forty.
Show the answer
False
Why
False, and this is the central lesson of stemmatics. If the forty all descend from a single copy that introduced the error, they are one witness repeated forty times. Two manuscripts from an independent branch can outweigh them. Witnesses are weighed by descent, not counted.
Practise Five Disciplines and Their Questions
The app has 6 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Literature I is free to start.