Recentiores, non deteriores.
—Pasquali
… if an authentic reading could survive once in this way
in a single not very early copy, it might do so elsewhere.
Clearly it will not do to ascribe any inherently plausible
reading found only in late MSS to ‘conjecture’ without
first considering when and under what circumstances
the postulated emendator may reasonably be imagined
to have worked – which is a historical question.
—E. J. Kenney
A propensity to emendation, so far from
discrediting a manuscript, may be
symptomatic of an interest in the text
that also prompted the consultation
of out-of-the-way copies.
—M. L. West
The Transmission of the Text of Lucan in the Ninth Century (Gotoff)
By and large, freehand correction, even of the most obvious errors, cannot be proved by the Lucan manuscripts to have been practiced in the ninth century. While some obvious corruptions may have been corrected without reference to another manuscript, the number of impossible readings entered into texts by correctors indicates that they were misreading or slavishly following mistakes in other manuscripts.
One perennial issue is the fifteenth-century Italian manuscripts. Their source is a copy made for Poggio in 1417; what is uncertain is the source of Poggio’s copy: an extant manuscript, or an independent source? … Butterfield offers no real arguments against the use of another manuscript by any of the correctors of O, just assertions of what he finds probable; but the conjectural interest and ability he posits for ninth-century monks are anachronistic.… In a desperate attempt to avoid recognizing the obvious, that O3 employed another manuscript, Butterfield claims that O3 used aliter to introduce a conjecture, a word used elsewhere only to introduce variants of collation. Most students of the subject believe that Carolingian scribes rarely if ever conjecture: they collate.… I now think it all but certain that at least one of the correctors, and possibly the source of Poggio’s copy, did have access to other readings – perhaps a separate manuscript, perhaps only variants in the archetype itself.
Heinsius is described as accepting readings from later manuscripts quae plus leporis quam ueritatis prae se ferebant. This is a pleasing phrase, but has no critical weight; we may note the number of charming readings T. rightly adopts from the early excerptions that are available to us for so small a portion of the text … The obvious implication is that there are many charming and true readings to be restored from later manuscripts or by conjecture in the remainder of the text.
Towards a New Edition of Ovid’s Ibis (Keeline)
o presents us with a large number of good extra-stemmatic readings that were not found in the archetype and that could not or would not have been conjectured by contemporary humanist correctors. It seems very possible that the copyist of o had access to a manuscript that lies outside our tradition and that preserved true and valuable readings.
In Defence of the Leiden Tacitus (Wellesley)
This juxtaposition of nonsense and of something a good deal better than common sense is our best guarantee that the good readings in L are not the product of an eccentric and gifted emendator, but reflect a tradition independent of, and in some ways superior to, that of the Second Medicean.