CONTAMINATION IN PHILOLOGY

In the field of Textual Criticism, the dependence of an exemplar from another is a necessary prerequisite when drawing a family tree or stemma codicum. In its absence, it is impossible to try and reconstruct a text, that is to re-establish the original, or rather establish a version as close as possible to the original. If a scribe did not copy his text from a single exemplar only, but made also use of another, even though partially or only for individual variant readings, the ideal process of reconstruction of the original text is interrupted and the interference may hinder the re-constitution of its family tree. This interference is known as contamination. The phenomenon has proved to be more and more frequent in the tradition of classical texts and is still a debated problem to scholars in classical and modern philology.