Scribes and Scholars

Part 1 Antiquity: ancient books; the library of the museum and Hellenistic scholarship; other Hellenistic work; books and scholarship in the Roman Republic; developments under the early empire; archaism in the second century; the compendium and the commentary; from roll to codex; paganism and Christianity in the 4th century; the subscriptions. Part 2 The Greek east: scholarship and literature under the Roman Empire; the Christian church and classical studies; the early Byzantine period; Greek texts in the Orient; the Renaissance of the 9th century; the later Byzantine period. Part 3 The Latin west: the dark ages; Ireland and England; the Anglo-Saxon missionaries; insular influence on classical texts; the Carolingian revival; the development of Caroline miniscule; Carolingian libraries and the Latin classics; Carolingian scholarship; the Carolingian twilight; the resurgence of Monte Cassino; the 12th-century Renaissance; the scholastic age; Greek in the west in the middle ages. Part 4 The renaissance: humanism; the first humanists; the consolidation of humanism - Petrarch and his generation; Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406); the great age of discovery - Poggio (1380-1459); Latin scholarship in the 15th century - Valla and Politian; Greek studies - diplomats, refugees and book collectors; Greek scholarship in the 15th century - Bessarion and Politian; the first printed Greek texts - Aldus Manutius and Marcus Musurus; Erasmus (1469-1536). Part 5 Some aspects of scholarship since the Renaissance: the Counter-Reformation - the high Renaissance in Italy; the beginnings of humanism and scholarship in France; the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries; Richard Bentley (1662-1742) - classical and theological studies; the origins of paleography; discoveries of texts since the Renaissance - palimpsests, papyri, other manuscript discoveries, epigraphic texts; epilogue. Part 6 Textual criticism: the development of the theory of textual criticism; the stemmatic theory of recension; limitations of the stemmatic method; age and merit in individual manuscripts; indirect tradition; some other basic principles; corruptions; fluid forms of transmission - technical and popular literature; conventions in the "apparatus criticus"; conclusion.