Henri Quentin

Dom Henri Quentin (7 October 1872, Saint-Thierry - 4 February 1935, Rome) was a French Benedictine monk.

He pioneered techniques to compare texts and produce trees of relationships between version and editions in order to study their origins and variations.

In 1907, he was called to Rome to direct the work of the Pontifical Commission for the Revision of the Vulgate, newly created by Pope Pius X and entrusted to the Order of St Benedict.

Faced with the enormous mass of manuscripts of the Bible, and the special relationship of copyists with this text, Dom Quentin was obliged to change the approach he had adopted for martyrologies and criticize the methods traditionally applied in the establishment of a stemma codicum.

The method of Dom Quentin has been much discussed[1] and often criticized,[2] but has attracted interest because of its arithmetical character and its capacity for automation.