Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature

Fascinating book. The tranmission of our ancient texts through Byzantine history and the Latin West via the Renaissance. To me, perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of history.The book is well written and worth the investment in time needed to read it.

The writing is not as transparent as it could be, but the information is all there if you hunt and cross-check. It's not a book to read, but a book to work through and learn from. I

A book that fills in many gaps to a field of study that so critically defines the development of humanities and reviews the posture of contemporary knowledge. I definitely recommend this book being among your library as it gives curation to your collection just by being on your shelf.

Après les travaux d'Alphonse Dain et de Jean Irigoin ce travail apparu du côté anglophone me paraît être ce qu'on peut lire de meilleur sur la transmission des textes et des manuscrits de l'Antiquité.

本当に本当に昔の人たちはたいへんだったんだなあ〜、と感心しました。実に便利な時代・世界に生かされていることを今更ながら実感しました。

Scribes & Scolars (2013) describes the ways and means by which classical literature has come down to modern times, beginning with a brief description of classical literacy and literary culture, materials of writing and distribution of literature, followed by the consequences of the collapse of the classical world for literary traditions. A description of the low point of the dark ages is followed by the beginnings of retrieval during the Carolingian renaissance, the 11th and 12th centuries, the Renaissance and the early modern era of first editions. A final chapter looks are current methods of criticism. // Especially interesting was to read about the inexorible decline of culture at the end of the classical age, in particular the already profound diminishing caused by the crisis of the third age CE, and also the decline of production in Greece following Roman occupation. The decline then under the early Christians is described well, and memorable also is the impact of the fall of Constantinople, which must have been an unimaginable disaster for those involved. // Some special points: (1) A description of the difficulty of retrieving errors in the era of manuscripts: Cicero had apparently written to his publisher asking to have a passage changed, but some of the unedited versions had already been sold, and all surfiving texts feature the unchanged text. It was only through the discovery of the letter asking for the change, almost 2000 years later, that Cicero's wish was finally realized. (2) An interesting description of the prehumanists of Padua, of whom I knew nothing. (3) P171 describes how Sir Henry Savile (1549-1622) published an edition of a churchfather founded on 16.000 pages of preparatory notes. The work occupied him so that his wife was brought to remard: "Sir Henry, I would I were a book too, and then you would a little more respect me". (4) P200 refers to a lately discoverd essay by Galen, "On avoiding grief" which, in addition to its subject matter, apparently discibes his personal library and his own habits.

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.