Question 76·200 Super-Hard SAT Reading Questions·Craft and Structure

Text 1

Textual historian Amara Bell cautions that manuscripts sharing a legal formula need not have been copied from one another; each may draw independently on a common template. She gives more weight to a shared innovation—an unusual change absent from the template—but says that such a change establishes a textual relationship, not necessarily direct copying. The direction of that relationship becomes clearer when physical evidence in one manuscript shows an innovation arising during revision and a later manuscript embeds the revised wording seamlessly. Differences in spelling carry less weight because copyists often updated spelling while retaining wording.

Text 2

Most surviving fourteenth-century copies of a charter use the formula “to Elena and her heirs forever.” The Norwick manuscript, dated 1420, initially read “to Elena forever,” but its scribe inserted “as well as to her heirs” above the line, producing the unusual wording “to Elena, as well as to her heirs, forever.” The Eastmere manuscript, dated 1465, presents that unusual wording as uninterrupted text. Eastmere modernizes spelling throughout, and no other surviving manuscript written before 1465 contains the paraphrase found in Norwick.

Based on the texts, which choice best states how Bell would most likely interpret the evidence described in Text 2?