Stably reflexive modules and a lemma of Knudsen

In his fundamental work on the stack of stable n-pointed genus g curves, Finn F. Knudsen introduced the concept of a stably reflexive module in order to prove a key technical lemma. We propose an alternative definition and generalise the results in the appendix to his article. Then we give a `coordinate free' generalisation of his lemma, generalise a construction used in Knudsen's proof concerning versal families of pointed algebras, and show that Knudsen's stabilisation construction works for plane curve singularities. In addition we prove approximation theorems generalising Cohen-Macaulay approximation with stably reflexive modules in flat families. The generalisation is not covered (even in the closed fibres) by the Auslander-Buchweitz axioms.