0.9 Textual criticism & Textual transmission  (Page 3/5)

The first place to turn to find out the history of most works of Latin literature is:

L. D. Reynolds ed., Texts and Transmission (1983). A collection of articles of remarkably high quality about the transmission of every major Latin author (and some fairly minor ones).

Other guides are much less useful and much less complete, e.g.

F. W. Hall, Companion to Classical Texts (1913; now very out of date)

H. Hunger et al., Geschichte der Textüberlieferung der antiken und mittelalterlichen Literatur, I : Antikes und mittelalterliches Buch- und Schriftwesen, Ueberlieferungsgeschichte der antiken Literatur (1961)

The one great, classic work on the transmission of ancient literature is:

G. Pasquali, Storia della tradizione e critica del testo (ed. 2, 1962)

Some other recent works dealing with more than a single author include:

G. Cavallo et al., Lo Spazio letterario di Roma antica (1989--)

O. Pecere, ed., Itinerari dei testi antichi (1991)

O. Pecere and M. Reeve, eds., Formative stages of classical traditions : Latin texts from antiquity to the Renaissance (1995)

C. Questa and R. Raffaelli, eds., Il Libro e il testo (1984)

3. great editions and works of practical criticism

When it comes to the history of particular texts, every scholar has his or her own favorites, and most important works are signalled in Texts and Transmission . The one work on a non-classical text that is necessary reading is:

L. Traube, Textgeschichte der Regula Benedicti (ed. 2, 1910). If you are seriously interested in textual criticism or the history of texts, start here. In fact, read anything Traube ever wrote. Various essays on the transmission of texts are included in his Kleine Schriften (1920). Some of his conclusions have been modified by later research, but no one has ever had a better understanding of the process of transmission. A note on intellectual genealogy: Traube taught, among others, the American scholars E. K. Rand, E. A. Lowe, and C. H. Beeson; most American palaeographers and textual critics of Latin in the twentieth century were taught by them.

If you really want to learn textual criticism, read the work of good editors and historians of texts. For Latin literature, here are some I admire, listed by scholar, not by ancient text.. There are other outstanding editions; these offer prefaces or comments that illuminate editorial method and textual history. The secondary bibliography offered on a few scholars is very limited, but offers a start.

R. Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus ex recensione&cum notis atque emendationibus Richardi Bentleii (1711)

---, ed., P. Terenti Afri Comoediae (1727)

On Bentley, see now K. Haugen, Richard Bentley: Scholarship and Criticism in Eighteenth-Century England (Diss. Princeton 2001)

Giuseppe Billanovich, “Petrarch and the Textual Tradition of Livy” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14 (1951) 137-208

---, “Dall’antica Ravenna alle bibliotheche umanistiche” Aevum 30 (1956) 319-53

W. Clausen, ed., A. Persi Flacci Saturarum liber (1956)

E. Courtney, “The Transmission of Juvenal’s Text,” BICS 14 (1967) 38-50