I am currently reading Roman Lives by Plutarch, and was wondering if there was a way I can find out what the oldest copy is and how modern historians have obtained the text - there are frighteningly few resources available online for meta-historians (the historians of historiography)
For example I read here that Plutarch was translated by Francesco Filelfo in the 15th century, but haven't been able to find anything else.
The preface of any critical edition will give a list of the major (or all) manuscripts/manuscript families, the editor's proposed stemma, and other information about the text's transmission and reception (including, for example, the date of the editio princeps in the Renaissance). Different editors will propose different things, but generally speaking a critical edition is the best place to look to see the manuscript history. That is, after all, what critical editions are for.
Problem is, you need a critical edition of the text. While for some (particularly controversial) texts you might find other material--a history of published manuscripts, for example--those resources are rarely easier to find than the critical editions. In some cases you might find the information you're looking for in a commentary, but I wouldn't count on it. OCTs and Teubners don't grow on trees, but if you have access to a research library, university or not, you should be able to get your hands on the necessary editions. The Loebs, which are online, also often have compressed and simplified stemmas and notes on the textual tradition, but since the Loebs don't have an app crit it's a mixed bag. But the Loeb Online is in the first place the most irritating online database in the history of the universe. In the second place, anyone who has access to the Loeb Online almost certainly either has access to the OCT or Teubner critical editions or can afford to buy them. I'm afraid I'm not aware of anywhere else you're likely to find the stemma you're looking for online, not in any systematic sort of way.