n. The study of multiple surviving versions of the same text with the aim of reconstructing a lost original.
WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
n. the humanistic discipline that attempts to reconstruct the transmission of a text (especially a text in manuscript form) on the basis of relations between the various surviving manuscripts (sometimes using cladistic analysis)
Word Usage
"I tend to think that only people doing stemmatics and philology get it right because no claim to the "right" reading can be confirmed or rejected."