This collection of twenty essays represents an overview of R.'s contributions to the theory and practice of textual criticism and the transmission of classical texts. The essays are divided into six sections. The first four ‘in a stemmatic hierarchy’ (p. x) cover ‘The Original’, ‘Stemmatic Method’, ‘Archetypes’ and ‘Exemplar and Copy’. The essays in the fifth section, ‘History and Geography’, explore the use of external evidence, and those in the final section, ‘Episodes in Editing’, form a miscellany full of anecdote and insight.
As R. writes in the introduction, his career took its critical turn in the course of preparing a review (CR 24 [1974], 57–64) of Heinrich Dörrie's edition of Heroides, a direction that was confirmed by his subsequent contributions to Texts and Transmission (1983). The ten essays in the first four sections are primarily concerned with this immersion in textual criticism. Several of the essays are excellent introductions to general questions: ‘Stemmatic Method: “qualcosa che non funziona”?’ is an overview with lucid explanations of the method's limitations; ‘Shared Innovations, Dichotomies, and Evolution’ moves from the transmission of texts to the transmission of chromosomes and back to investigate how transmission in general works. The latter essay is one of several that explore the application of models from the natural sciences to textual criticism.
Several other themes emerge from the essays, but even more significant, perhaps, is the approach to the subject. These essays display a spirit of restless inquiry: R. is constantly asking rather than telling; looking for the historical origins of an approach rather than simply making rulings on contested points. In this way these essays serve as a sort of masterclass on textual criticism. One of the recurring themes in the class is what to make of Bédier's silva portentiosa of two-branched traditions: does this represent a fatal flaw of the so-called Lachmannian method, a natural result of transmission, or something in between? R. does not settle the argument, but his exploration of the question is the important point. Finally, the work of two great Italian scholars, Giorgio Pasquali and Sebastiano Timpanaro, with whom R. clearly has much sympathy, appears as a touchstone throughout these essays.
In the section entitled ‘History and Geography’, the first of the four essays deals with getting the textual critic out of his or her head to imagine manuscripts in the physical world (i.e. carried by men on horses), while the final three concern the scholars of the Renaissance and their approaches to editing classical texts. Two of these, ‘The Rediscovery of Classical Texts in the Renaissance’ and ‘Classical Scholarship in the Renaissance’, are excellent overviews, filled with detail: here is Salutati editing Cicero (pp. 248–51), there is Beatus Rhenanus complaining of others' lack of curiosity in the manuscripts of Livy (p. 268). Here as elsewhere, R.'s interest is in classical texts, an adjective that is not defined, but as used seems to refer to texts in Latin and Greek composed before the third century a.d.
In the final section, ‘Episodes in Editing’, the essay ‘Cuius in usum? Recent and Future Editing’ (written for JRS in 2000) comes as close as any in the volume to summarising R.'s approach. Writing about text editing often swings between the poles of general, often lapidary rules, such as those in Maas, and collections of individual problems solved. This essay is able deftly to combine both, and along with the following essay, ‘Editing Classical Texts with a Computer’, it raises important questions about how the tradition will continue. Although anxiety about the future of the discipline is another theme that returns from time to time in the essays, this melancholy note is equally often countered by R.'s own generous attitude towards his subject and indications of avenues for future work, which come with especially welcome cautions about the uncritical use of models and technology imported from other disciplines to construct critical editions.
The open-minded spirit is also found in one of the most welcome aspects of this volume, namely R.'s engagement with non-anglophone scholarship (represented here by two essays written in Italian and one in German). This is brought home all the more by comparing these essays with the remarks by R.'s predecessor as Kennedy Professor of Latin in Cambridge, A.E. Housman, which are contained in ‘Dust and Fudge: Manuscripts in Housman's Generation’. The international aspects of this volume continue with its very handsome production by Edizione di Storia e Letteratura in Rome.
The volume represents R.'s own collection and arrangement of his work. One of the essays is published here for the first time, but very many have been substantially revised and twelve have received an extra layer of commentary in the addenda (pp. 397–9). As a result, the individual essays and the volume as a whole represent later stages of R.'s thought and raise just the sort of questions about textual stability, authorial intention and transmission that R. explores with such gusto within.
To paraphrase R.'s opening line on the Agrimensores from Texts and Transmission, every schoolboy knows that textual critics are practical people, but not every schoolboy knows what they did with a stemma. Fortunately, those interested in finding out have an interesting and knowledgeable companion in this collection.
