stemma codicum

Meaning

Noun

• A schema, resulting from the stemmatics process of recension, in which all surviving manuscript of a given text are represented with their derivation, via intermediary hyparchetype, from a single archetype.

Origin

• Latin: stemma + cōdicum (genitive plural form of cōdex, “book”, “manuscript”, “codex”) = “pedigree of codices”, “family tree of manuscripts”