Combining the Encoding of Variants with

Stemmatological Analysis: the case of Chrétien's 'Cligés'

Benedetta Salvati 1,2 and Jean-Baptiste Camps 1

1 Centre Jean-Mabillon, École nationale des chartes, PSL 2 Université de Lausanne

The tradition of Chrétien de Troyes' renowned Arthurian romances is notably complex and has represented, since Foerster's pioneering research in the late 19th century [START_REF] Foerster | Christian von Troyes sämtliche werke: Cliges[END_REF], a major challenge for many of the most prominent romance philologists. Turning more specifically to the Cligés (1175-76 ca.), the presence, on the one hand, of an endemic textual contamination, causing the entanglement of family groups, and, on the other hand, of an higher number of seemingly adiaphoric readings, has always constituted an important obstacle, not only for the study of the transmission of the romance, but also, and above all, for its edition.

Although, its recensio has been the subject of further studies, notably, but not only, by the French scholar A. Micha [START_REF] Micha | Prolégomènes à une édition de Cligès[END_REF], the massive amount of textual data, compounded with the contradictory nature of the conclusions that may be drawn from them, has made it impossible to reach definitive, or even conclusive results [START_REF] Gregory | Cliges: Chretien de troyes[END_REF]Luttrell, 1993, Micha, 1939).

This paper intends to return to the ongoing issue of the Cligés' transmission and textual reconstruction, through a new methodological approach, hybridising digital editing, variant typing, qualitative and stemmatological analyses. It will rely on the full transcription of both complete and fragmentary manuscripts, that has been conceived as a part of an ambitious editorial project, carried out by Benedetta Salvati, as a natural continuation of her master's dissertation at the University Ca' Foscari of Venice (IRHT -Section romane, 2023, [START_REF] Salvati | Cligés. Edizione critica fondata sul corpus manoscritto completo, sulla base del ms[END_REF].

Different types of encoding for variant locations and individual readings, including graphic, morphological, morphosyntactic and semantic variants, as well as, the causes of the variance (e.g., paleographic misreadings, copyists' individual line scanning practice, ...), have been provided, by following a taxonomy currently being developed in the context of an international seminar held at the École des chartes 1 .

Exploratory stemmatological methods will be applied to the variant locations (Camps andCafiero, 2014, 2018), and the results of different selections fed to stemmatological algorithms (Fig. 1). Finally, the consistency or not of different types (e.g., graphic, lexical. . . ) of variant locations towards stemmatic hypotheses will be systematically examined (Table 1).

1 Seminar Variantes (2022-24), coordinated by Frédéric Duval, Benedetta Salvati and Jean-Baptiste Camps. We thank here the many participants for their contributions to the taxonomy, and in particular Lucence Ing for her contribution to modelling.

1

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Contradictions between variant locations (left) and the result of a stemmatological algorithm applied to one selection of variant locations (right)

Table 1 :

 1 Ratio of variant locations that do not contradict the groupings, by type (the third column, a median over all pairs, two by two, is intended as a baseline).

	Type	{AB}{CR} {ABP}{CRS} All pairs Support
	Semantic	94.55	94.55	94.06	202
	Morphological	81.81	84.84	84.85	33
	ALL	86.84	89.15	89.57	1688