Michael D Reeve, Professor Emeritus of Cambridge University, is a wonderful writer. I suspect that he could take just about any subject which interested him, and write about it with great wit and insight, revealing both the beauty and the importance of that subject to the reader. Fortunately for those of us interested in Classical literature, Reeves has written mostly about the transmission of Classical literature, primarily the Latin Classics, although, as he explains to the reader of the volume under review here, he began his career focused upon Greek. He has published editions of works by Longus, Cicero, Vegetius and Geoffrey of Monmouth, as well as numerous contributions to scholarly journals. Manuscripts and Methods is a selection of 18 previously-published essays by Reeve, plus 2 hitherto-unpublished essays and an introduction, published in Rome in 2011 by Edizioni du storia e letteratura.
The book is divided into 6 sections:
I: The Original, dealing with the author's original copy of the text, also referred to by the pros as the autograph. In the case of Classical Latin, we do not today possess an autogragh for any of the works. The whole task of the profession to which Reeve belongs, scholarly editing, is to restore as nearly as possible the original text. Of course, as Reeve points out, even if we did have the original manuscript, there would almost certainly be some errors in it.
II: Stemmatic Method, the process of determining which of the existing manuscripts are copies of which of the others. Reeve takes the position that it is impossible to be absolutely certain which manuscripts derive from which, but that the stemmatic method is nevertheless the best method we currently have, and that we ought to very carefully do the very best we can with it.
III: Archetypes. An archetype is a manuscript from which all other surviving manuscripts derive, whether as direct copies, or copies of copies, etc. A manuscript may be the archetype off all of the manuscripts of a given text, or it may be the archetype of a group of the manuscripts of that text. We may possess an archetype, or we may theoretically re-construct and postulate an archetype on the basis of existing manuscripts.
IV: Exemplar and Copy. An exemplar is a script from which another one has been copied. One of the essays in this section deals with the topic of manuscripts which were copied from early printed books. This is an example of Reeve pointing out something which only became obvious after he pointed it out. Perhaps many of us tend to think of the invention of printing as having done away with the making of book-length manuscripts, but of course it didn't do so instantly.
V: History and Goegraphy. This section also could have been entitled: The Italian Renaissance, From the Point of View of the Study of Classical Literature. Readers who until now have had no knowledge of or interest in the Renaissance might want to start with this section, which is filled with examples of Reeve re-constructing and describing the lives and careers of Classical scholars of previous ages, something which he does better than anyone else I know, something he does so well that any intelligent reader might find him- or herself suddenly and unexpectedly fascinated with the Renaissance, even if he or she is confronted by many blocks of texts in languages which he or she cannot decipher. This section shows why I rate Reeve, as an essayist, among the very best, alongside Edward Hoagland writing about his own life and Gore Vidal writing about the history and politics of Washington, DC.
VI: Episodes in Editing. The essays in the book's final section each describe a single topic in the history of the struggles to re-create the Classical past, from the Monk Lupus working on the text of Livy in the 9th century, to 21st-century attempts to apply computer technology to scholarly editing.
Throughout the book, there are many and lengthy quotations of ancient authors and Classicists of all eras, in Latin, Greek, German, Italian and French, and I only noticed one translation by Reeve, of Herodotus' Greek into English. The rest is untranslated, and Reeve expects you to be able to read Latin, German, Italian and French.
And it's not just quotations. 2 of Reeve's entire essays are in Italian, and another one is in German. It does appear that to be a Classical scholar these days is to be a polyglot. Reeve's essay in German is not as good as those in English, from a standpoint of prose style, but it is flawless, which is more than I can say for many highly-renowned authors whose first language is German. And those other 2 essays -- they're definitely in Italian. My Italian is good enough that I could see right away that they were in Italian. Maybe we should leave it at that.
The copious polyglotism of the volume, and the lack of translation into English, seems to be a declaration on Reeve's part that he is not particularly interested in a wide reading public. Still, if you can read only English, I would urge you to get this volume and read the English parts. They make up most of the book, and you don't have to know anything about ancient Latin or Greek literature to become fascinated by what Reeve has to say.
And you might just possibly become so fascinated that you'll begin to become curious about all of those non-English parts, so curious that you might just end up learning another language or 3. And learning another language, although it is a strenuous task for all but a very few linguistic geniuses, is a glorious experience. It opens up a whole new part of the world.
Also, I noticed something: whatever Reeve's intentions may have been concerning the size of his target audience -- on the copyright page, beneath "Prima edizione: luglio 2011" ("First edition: July 2011") and the ISBN number, it says: "settima ristampa: gennaio 2017," which either means "seventh printing: January 2017" or "seventh re-printing, January 2017," I'm not sure which. But either way, it might mean that the readership of this book is not exactly narrow.
Is it required reading for many students of the Classics? It would be nice to think that many young people starting out on careers in Classics would be introduced to Reeve in this way. Or was the book in its 7th (or 8th?) printing already by January 2017 because that many people wanted to read it without anyone requiring them to? Or perhaps has word of mouth spread from students to others?
Perhaps I'm getting carried away here, and they're very small printings. I hope not. I hope they're huge. I strongly encourage you to get ahold of this book and read as much of it as you can.
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