Classics from Papyrus to the Internet: An Introduction to Transmission and Reception

by Jeffrey M. Hunt, R. Alden Smith, Fabio Stok

Winner, PROSE Award, Classics, Association of American Publishers (AAP), 2018 Writing down the epic tales of the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus in texts that became the Iliad and the Odyssey was a defining moment in the intellectual history of the West, a moment from which many current conventions and attitudes toward books can be traced. But how did texts originally written on papyrus in perhaps the eighth century BC survive across nearly three millennia, so that today people can read them electronically on a smartphone? Classics from Papyrus to the Internet provides a fresh, authoritative overview of the transmission and reception of classical texts from antiquity to the present. The authors begin with a discussion of ancient literacy, book production, papyrology, epigraphy, and scholarship, and then examine how classical texts were transmitted from the medieval period through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the modern era. They also address the question of reception, looking at how succeeding generations responded to classical texts, preserving some but not others. This sheds light on the origins of numerous scholarly disciplines that continue to shape our understanding of the past, as well as the determined effort required to keep the literary tradition alive. As a resource for students and scholars in fields such as classics, medieval studies, comparative literature, paleography, papyrology, and Egyptology, Classics from Papyrus to the Internet presents and discusses the major reference works and online professional tools for studying literary transmission.

Genres: Classics

360 pages, Hardcover

Published July 25, 2017

Reviews

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fantastic read. I felt like I was taking a mini-university course on the transmission and reception of classical texts. I savored each chapter and added an unbelievable amount of marginalia. The book is full of solid analysis and peppered with neat and obscure tidbits to keep the reader engaged and excited. One such funny tidbit is a frequent medieval text colophon: “Explicit hoc totum / Pro Christo da mihi potum”, translated as “The whole work is finished by my quill / For Christ’s sake give me a swill!” (p. 66).

The authors provide good overviews of principal players across the history of classical texts: in both their creation, transmission and reception. They discuss Latin & Greek writing on papyrus, parchment, vellum, stone, and eventually paper, as well as how these texts were created, copied, censored, lost, forged, and stored in libraries or private collections. They cover punctuation, abbreviations (the Romans were insane!), font styles, codex vs scroll, etc. They also give a fascinating argument on how the “dark ages” weren’t dark but were thought so partly due to confusion on the part of early Renaissance humanists. These individuals mistook manuscripts from the 9th century CE to be ancient ones since they didn’t recognize the Carolingian miniscule font! They thought they were rediscovering lost classical authors who hadn’t been read in a millennium, but in fact had been read and copied only 500 years prior (pp. 164-5).

There is something for everyone in this book, be they a scholar, student, or general audience member. The detailed notes at the end are a wonderful jumping off point for deeper research. For further reading, I recommend Scribes and Scholars by Reynolds & Wilson, also mentioned in the preface and forward.