In Praise of divinatio. The Value of “True Errors” and Metrical Heuristics

This article argues that the importance of conjecture, or divinatio, has been downplayed in the mainstream discourse on textual criticism, which has increasingly come to focus on stemmatology alone. It notes that in spite of the “scientific” appearance of stemmatology, the results of divinatio are often more reliable and should be treated as such. It is in the nature of divinatio, however, that it is often more powerful in detecting errors than in restoring the text. While this may be construed as a limitation, the article argues that the detection of errors has received insufficient recognition as a useful endeavour, independent of reconstruction. The article also explores ways of making metrical analysis into a more useful tool for textual criticism. That discussion is of particular relevance to early Germanic poetry.