Texts, Editors, and Readers Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism

This book re-examines the most traditional area of classical scholarship, offering critical assessments of the current state of the field, its methods and controversies, and its prospects for the future in a digital environment. Each stage of the editorial process is examined, from gathering and evaluating manuscript evidence to constructing the text and critical apparatus, with particular attention given to areas of dispute, such as the role of conjecture. The importance of subjective factors at every point is highlighted. An Appendix offers practical guidance in reading a critical apparatus. The discussion is framed in a way that is accessible to non-specialists, with all Latin texts translated. The book will be useful both to classicists who are not textual critics and to non-classicists interested in issues of editing.

Introduction; 1. Textual criticism in a post-heroic age; 2. The rhetoric of textual criticism/textual criticism as rhetoric; 3. Establishing the text 1: recension; 4. Establishing the text 2: conjecture; 5. Establishing the text 3: interpolation, collaboration, and intertextuality; 6. Textual criticism and literary criticism: the case of Propertius; 7. Presenting the text: the critical edition and its discontents; 8. The future: problems and prospects; Appendix: reading a critical apparatus.

Richard Tarrant is Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature at Harvard University. He has long been interested in issues of editing classical texts, and has produced editions of two tragedies by Seneca (Agamemnon and Thyestes) and edited Ovid's Metamorphoses for the Oxford Classical Texts series. His most recent book, a commentary on Virgil, Aeneid Book XII, published in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series, has received the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society for Classical Studies and the Premio Internazionale 'Virgilio' from the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana in Mantova.