Stemmatology is the discipline that attempts to reconstruct the transmission of a text on the basis of relations between the various surviving manuscripts. The object of this volume is the evaluation of the most recent methods and techniques in the field of stemmatology, as well as the development of new ones. The book is largely interdisciplinary in character: it contains contributions from scholars from classical, historical, biblical, medieval and modern language studies, as well as from mathematical and computer scientists and biologists. The contributions in the book have been divided into two sections. The first section deals with various stemmatological methods and techniques. The second section focuses more specifically on the various problems concerning textual variation.An earlier volume on Studies in Stemmatology was published in 1996 and opened the most actual state of the art in stemmatology to a broad audience. That first volume was very well received by stemmatologists and also gave an impulse to new research, as several articles in the current volume clearly illustrate. Table of contentsPrologue vii Stemmatological methods and techniques Parallels between stemmatology and phylogenetics Christopher Howe, Adrian Barbrook, Linne Mooney and Peter Robinson 3 Problems of a highly contaminated tradition: the New Testament: Stemmata of variants as a source of a genealogy for witnesses Gerd Mink 13 Kinds of variant in the manuscript tradition of the Greek New Testament Klaus Wachtel 87 How shock waves revealed successive contamination: A cardiogram of early sixteenth-century printed Dutch Bibles August den Hollander 99 The manuscript tradition of the Cligés of Chrétien de Troyes: A stemmatological approach Margot van Mulken 113 Textual variation Genealogy by chance! On the significance of accidental variation (parallelisms) Ulrich Schmid 127 Constructing initial binary trees in stemmatology Evert Wattel 145 Trouble in the trees! Variant selection and tree construction illustrated by the texts of Targum Judges Willem F. Smelik 167 Scribal variations: When are they genealogically relevant - and when are they to be considered as instances of 'mouvance'? Lene Schøsler 207 The effects of weighting kinds of variants Matthew Spencer, Linne Mooney, Adrian Barbrook, Barbara Bordalejo,Christopher Howe and Peter Robinson 227 Cluster analysis and the Three Level Method in the study of the Gospels inSlavonic Dina Mironova 241 Different kinds of tradition in Targum Jonathan to Isaiah Alberdina Houtman 269 Valentin and Namelos discover their parentage: Narrative elements in the family tree of an international medieval tale Annelies Roeleveld, Erika Langbroek and Evert Wattel 285 Index 305