A wonderful account of the methods behind the transmission and survival of ancient texts from generation to generation. Fascinating read. ( )

Along with music for string quartet and the mathematics of random variables, the transmission and recension of classical texts are of sublime interest to me. Unfortunately, like Peter Cook's would-be judge, I never had the Latin. Thus, this witty, intelligent, sophisticated, and fascinating book will have to do. And it does. ( )

This is a textbook aimed at graduate level classics scholars who can read Latin and make their way through Greek. My 3 years of high school Latin and 3 weeks of Greek tutorials aren't up to making any sense of the many passages in those languages, but that does not mean that most of the content of book was lost on me, just the fun details.
About 1/2 of the volume is about the various ways the Greek and Latin texts circulating at the end of the western Roman Empire were preserved to modern times. This is more about a series of sieves than about great disasters, though the two of the latter that are highlighted are the Eastern Roman Iconoclasts and the sacking of Constantinople in 1204. Not the loss of the library of Alexandria, which is passed over as exaggerated. Sieve #1 was the transfer from papyrus scroll to parchment codex, during a time when scholarship was at a lull, and materials were increasingly hard to get or afford. Sieve #2 was the transfer from unical to one of the much more readable minuscule scripts. The #0 sieve is that of fashion, which was pretty much a constant from the first written texts.
It is also the history of western textual criticism which arose from the near impossibility of getting a non-corrupted copy of any text and the strategies to fix one's own copy which pretty much started as soon as the first copy was made.
The tone is serious with a couple of capital snarks -
pg 94 "men were found who rose above the rather constipated limits of much Carolingian thought and literature"
pg 104 "This is largely a moral rag-bag of the type one meets frequently in the Middle Ages."
Classical scholarship since the Renaissance and an essay on textural criticism are about 1/4 and notes, index, and plates, gray and unattractive, the rest.
I do wish the term Byzantine would cease to be used for the Eastern Roman Empire. It's not how they thought of themselves. ( )

Scribes and Scholars by L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson is a treatise about the transmission of ancient Greek and Latin literature from the time of its creation until the early nineteenth century. It covers book production, libraries, book collecting, scripts, scrolls, codices, papyrus, parchment, paper, printing, book preservation, rediscovery of old and lost books, and many other similar topics. It treats the classical centuries in both Greece and Rome and the Roman Empire, the Western European Middle Ages, the Byzantine Empire, the Renaissance, and the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. It is filled with anecdotes and biographical information. It also offers a compendious description of textual criticism, its major concepts and methods.

The study is exhaustive, but Reynolds has a way with words and I didn't find it a slog to get through, except for the textual criticism parts, which Reynolds does have the good grace to warn the reader off of. One of the book's best features is detailed up-to-date bibliography (in the chapter notes). I recommend this book to classicists, medievalists, students of the Renaissance, and bibliophiles and library enthusiasts. ( )

http://geneg75075books.livejournal.com/ ( )