# Combining the Encoding of Variants with Stemmatological Analysis: the case of Chrétien's 'Cligés'

Benedetta Salvati, Jean-Baptiste Camps

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Benedetta Salvati, Jean-Baptiste Camps. Combining the Encoding of Variants with Stemmatological Analysis: the case of Chrétien's 'Cligés'. 2023. hal-04089045

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# Combining the Encoding of Variants with Stemmatological Analysis: the case of Chrétien’s ‘Cligés’

Benedetta Salvati<fnref n="1" />,² and Jean-Baptiste Camps<fnref n="1" />

¹Centre Jean-Mabillon, École nationale des chartes, PSL

²Université de Lausanne

The tradition of Chrétien de Troyes’ renowned Arthurian romances is notably complex and has represented, since Foerster’s pioneering research in the late 19th century (Foerster et al., 1884), a major challenge for many of the most prominent romance philologists. Turning more specifically to the *Cligés* (1175-76 ca.), the presence, on the one hand, of an endemic textual contamination, causing the entanglement of family groups, and, on the other hand, of an higher number of seemingly adiaphoric readings, has always constituted an important obstacle, not only for the study of the transmission of the romance, but also, and above all, for its edition.

Although, its *recensio* has been the subject of further studies, notably, but not only, by the French scholar A. Micha (Micha, 1938), the massive amount of textual data, compounded with the contradictory nature of the conclusions that may be drawn from them, has made it impossible to reach definitive, or even conclusive results (Gregory and Luttrell, 1993, Micha, 1939).

This paper intends to return to the ongoing issue of the *Cligés’* transmission and textual reconstruction, through a new methodological approach, hybridising digital editing, variant typing, qualitative and stemmatological analyses. It will rely on the full transcription of both complete and fragmentary manuscripts, that has been conceived as a part of an ambitious editorial project, carried out by Benedetta Salvati, as a natural continuation of her master’s dissertation at the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice (IRHT - Section romane, 2023, Salvati, 2020).

Different types of encoding for variant locations and individual readings, including graphic, morphological, morphosyntactic and semantic variants, as well as, the causes of the variance (e.g., paleographic misreadings, copyists’ individual line scanning practice, ...), have been provided, by following a taxonomy currently being developed in the context of an international seminar held at the École des chartes<fnref n="1" />.

Exploratory stemmatological methods will be applied to the variant locations (Camps and Cafiero, 2014, 2018), and the results of different selections fed to stemmatological algorithms (Fig. 1). Finally, the consistency or not of different types (e.g., graphic, lexical...) of variant locations towards stemmatic hypotheses will be systematically examined (Table 1).

<footnote n="1">¹ Seminar *Variantes* (2022-24), coordinated by Frédéric Duval, Benedetta Salvati and Jean-Baptiste Camps. We thank here the many participants for their contributions to the taxonomy, and in particular Lucence Ing for her contribution to modelling.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: Contradictions between variant locations (left) and the result of a stemmatological algorithm applied to one selection of variant locations (right)</figcaption></figure>

<table><caption>Table 1: Ratio of variant locations that do not contradict the groupings, by type (the third column, a median over all pairs, two by two, is intended as a baseline).</caption><thead><tr><th>Type</th><th>{AB}{CR}</th><th>{ABP}{CRS}</th><th>All pairs</th><th>Support</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Semantic</td><td><strong>94.55</strong></td><td><strong>94.55</strong></td><td>94.06</td><td>202</td></tr><tr><td>Morphological</td><td>81.81</td><td>84.84</td><td><strong>84.85</strong></td><td>33</td></tr><tr><td>ALL</td><td>86.84</td><td>89.15</td><td><strong>89.57</strong></td><td>1688</td></tr></tbody></table>

## References

Jean-Baptiste Camps and Florian Cafiero. Genealogical variant locations and simplified stemma: a test case. In Tara Andrews and Caroline Macé, editors, *Analysis of Ancient and Medieval Texts and Manuscripts: Digital Approaches*, number 1 in Lectio, pages 69–93. Brepols, 2014.

Jean-Baptiste Camps and Florian Cafiero. Stemmatology: an r package for the computer-assisted analysis of textual traditions. In Andrew U. Frank, Christine Ivanovic, Francesco Mambrini, Marco Passarotti, and Caroline Sporleder, editors, *Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Corpus-Based Research in the Humanities (CRH-2)*, pages 65–74, 2018. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.1117389. URL https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01695903/document.

Wendelin Foerster, Alfons Hilka, et al. *Christian von Troyes sämtliche werke: Cliges*, volume 1. M. Niemeyer, 1884.

Stewart Gregory and Claude Luttrell. Cliges: Chretien de troyes. *Cambridge: Brewer*, 1993.

IRHT - Section romane. Travaux d'édition en cours, 2023. URL https://romane.hypotheses.org/travaux-d edition-en-cours.

Alexandre Micha. *Prolégomènes à une édition de Cligès*. Société d'édition Les Belles lettres, 1938.

Alexandre Micha. *La tradition manuscrite des romans de Chrétien de Troyes*. E. Droz, 1939.

Benedetta Salvati. *Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés*. Edizione critica fondata sul corpus manoscritto completo, sulla base del ms. Paris, BN, fr. 375 (P). Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, 2020.