Digital philology versus classical philology in the study of the manuscript tradition of the Fuero Juzgo

Abstract

The aim of this article is to test four digital philology tools (Juxta, CollateX, Stemmaweb and TRAViz) to assess their concrete usefulness in collatio codicum and constitutio stemmatis for the philologist wanting to study a manuscript tradition with a large number of preserved witnesses. We have used them for our specific case study, the manuscript tradition of the Fuero Juzgo (Romance version of the Liber Iudiciorum), comparing the results with the families of manuscripts that we have identified using classical philology methods in order to understand to what extent the two methods (classical philology and digital philology) are complementary and to what extent the latter can help the former, both in terms of the quality of the results and in terms of the time that the philologist can save by using computer-based methods.