Like an old friend whose visits are always welcome, Scribes and Scholars returns. R. died in 1999, and W. alone signs the preface to this fourth edition. He succinctly explains what is new, ‘I have left the main text largely unaltered. The notes [which are mostly bibliographical] required a fair number of readjustments’, and he acknowledges the help of Professor Reeve, than whom none is better qualified to fill the void left by R. on the Latin side. Examples of new additions include the noting of the discovery of Galen's On avoiding grief on p. 200 and what is said about the Archimedes palimpsest on p. 289. The book remains the standard and best introduction to its subject.
But what precisely is this subject? Described by its authors as ‘A Guide to [better ‘History of’?] the transmission of Greek & Latin literature’, more than any other work Scribes and Scholars created the study of the transmission of the Classics, at least in the English-speaking world. It is not a palaeographical manual, not a history of classical scholarship, not a history of literary culture in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, not a guide to the editing of classical texts, not a history of libraries, ancient, mediaeval and modern, but it touches on all these subjects and shows how the student of transmission needs to have secure knowledge of them all. A few years before his death I asked R. how one went about acquiring such mastery, and was given the characteristically modest reply, ‘I sometimes feel that I am skating on very thin ice’. To the readers of Scribes and Scholars, the ice has never seemed thin. And since the first edition the eminence occupied by its two authors has become yet more lofty: R. went on to edit Seneca's Dialogi, Sallust and the De finibus, W. Basil, Menander Rhetor, Sophocles, Aristophanes, with Herodotus imminent; R.'s edited volume Texts and Transmission is the standard detailed work on the textual transmission of the Latin Classics; and W.'s Scholars of Byzantium and From Byzantium to Italy are first ports of call for anyone who wants a detailed study of the literary culture in which Greek manuscripts were copied. It is the sheer range of manuscripts and authors that these scholars have studied that has provided such a firm foundation for this book. One wonders whether any other book on the Classics published by Oxford University Press since the first edition of 1968 has been academically more successful.
It is not easy to find much of which to make adverse criticism. However, the book rarely give a sense of the number of manuscripts (whether large or small) that survive for many of the Graeco-Roman classics, and of how some large manuscript traditions, even comprising 150 manuscripts or more, may be classified with remarkable precision in matters both genealogical and geographical. On p. 125 (on the Renaissance) we are told, ‘At last Latin literature was emancipated from the role for which it had been so badly cast, that of paying second-fiddle to religion’. This is not wrong, but patristic texts were conceived as ‘Latin literature’, copied and read by the same scribes, housed in the same monasteries and libraries, and first edited by the same printers as the pagan classics; in general, the division between pagan and Christian is less emphasised on the Greek side, perhaps because W. has edited some of Basil. On p. 200 it is implied that Holkham Hall 121 is the only source for the probably spurious letter of Cyprian to Silvanus discovered by Bévenot; Diercks, Corpus Christianorum IID, p. 779, observed that it is found in Oxford, Bodl., MS. lat. theol. d. 4. It will not take readers of this fourth edition long to find misprints and inconsistencies of copy-editing, especially in the new material; and I hope that the massive and very ugly top margin that is found on my copy will not become standard with OUP, who harnessed technology more elegantly for the third edition of 1991.
