I’m finally getting around to Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism, which bulbul gave me back in 2018, and I thought I’d quote this passage from the introduction (p. 11; I added a few links):
Many errors arise from the interaction of more than one factor in the form and content of the text and the mental state of the scribe. One of the nicest examples of apparent error Christianus, the misreading in Petronius’ Satyricon 43.1 of ab asse creuit (‘he has grown from a penny’ or ‘he started out with only a penny’) as abbas secreuit (‘the abbot has hidden it away’), was almost certainly prompted as much by absence of word division in the exemplar and the scribe’s lack of familiarity with the coin term as, assis as by any grievances he may have harboured against his superior.
Finally, I cannot resist mentioning a slip for which I was responsible when editing the Canadian classical journal Phoenix. The Spring 1980 issue included a review of the edition of a text on military surveying, De metatione castrorum (‘On measuring camps’). In typing up the table of contents, I rendered the title as De metatione castorum, which could mean either ‘On measuring chaste men’ or ‘On measuring beavers’. An alert reader who adopted the second interpretation wrote to congratulate me on perpetrating such a quintessentially Canadian error.
It’s a well-written book full of good information, and I’ll probably be quoting more bits from it. Thanks again, bulbul!
Since no one has commented yet, this seems like a good time to put in a plug for the extremely silly movie Hundreds of
AbbotsBeavers, which I found very entertaining.Another good quote, from chap. 1, “Textual criticism in a post-heroic age”; he begins by describing “heroic editors” like Karl Lachmann, and continues:
More generally, Housman’s many references to critics of the past have helped to create a Pantheon of greats that begins with Scaliger, includes Heinsius and Gronovius, then Bentley and Lachmann, and implicitly culminates in Housman himself.
To display their superior qualities, heroes need to vanquish villains, or, even better, monsters, and so a natural consequence of the heroization of the editor is an approach to the history of editing that produces lurid narratives of colossal obtuseness or dereliction among predecessors. Samuel Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare is an early and distinguished example, but the most notorious specimens of the genre are Housman’s prefaces to his editions of Manilius, Juvenal, and Lucan, which have provided generations of readers with what Housman called a ‘low enjoyment’. Indeed, it is impossible to resist the appeal of such set pieces as the following:
Delightful as it is, that passage and others like it create a misleadingly clear-cut impression of textual scholarship, in which the heroes are exalted to an almost godlike status, while the objects of scorn sink to the level of dumb beasts.
After their deaths, ancient heroes became the objects of cult. The heroes of textual criticism have likewise received, and continue to receive, honours denied other scholars. Modern editors of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, myself included, have instituted the custom of signalling in their critical apparatuses the readings preferred by their seventeenth-century predecessor Nicolas Heinsius, especially when they have made a different choice. (In his Teubner edition of Horace, D. R. Shackleton Bailey has done something similar for readings preferred by Bentley.) A reviewer of my edition has called this practice ‘excessive’, and I am inclined to agree.
Today, however, the heroic critic is an endangered species, possibly even one on the verge of extinction. One of the last was D. R. Shackleton Bailey, who died in 2005, certainly heroic in the quantity of his editorial work – editions of all of Cicero’s letters, Horace, Lucan, Statius, Martial, the pseudo-Quintilianic declamations, and the Latin Anthology – and in his fertility as an emender (more than 2,000 original conjectures, by his own count), also in his concentration on editing and emending to the exclusion of literary criticism and in his admiration for Bentley and Housman, of whom he might well be seen as the intellectual descendant. Shackleton Bailey’s early work on Tibetan texts parallels Lachmann’s edition of the Nibelungenlied in its mastery of texts far removed from classical Latin.
As such figures have become rare, scepticism about the value of their work has been increasing. Here, for example, is Antonio La Penna already in 1982, reviewing Rudolf Hanslik’s Teubner text of Propertius:
lurid narratives of colossal obtuseness or dereliction among predecessors
Translators get to produce those too. Nabokov comes to mind.
one which turned as unswervingly to the false, the meaningless, the unmetrical, and the ungrammatical, as the needle to the pole
Reminded me of Dryden’s
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44181/mac-flecknoe
I believe this is what the Young People call a “diss track.”
“lurid narratives of colossal obtuseness or dereliction among predecessors” sounds like the Joyce Wars, discussed here at The Missing Joyce Scholar.
“the most notorious specimens of the genre are Housman’s prefaces to his editions of Manilius …” — Housman’s preface to Manilius is where he sneers at “the rustling harvest hedgerow”, as recently discussed here.
Looking forward to more from this book.