Overview

Readers and scholars of contemporary literature in English and other languages generally do not have to worry very much about their source texts: what is published in book form is essentially what the author wrote, perhaps with a few uncorrected typographical errors. Readers and scholars of Latin and Greek literature are not in such a fortunate position. The texts presented in 'critical editions', such as the Oxford Classical Texts or the Teubner or Budé series, though the outcome of painstaking scholarship carried out over centuries, are by no means as certain as those of most modern literature. Ancient texts were copied and recopied by hand over the course of more than a millennium, and in the process both accidental and deliberate alterations accumulated, often leaving the text in a grievously 'corrupted' condition. The original, 'autograph' texts are long lost, and often our earliest copies are more than a thousand years removed from them. Textual criticism is the discipline that examines whatever 'witnesses' to an ancient text are available and tries to identify mistakes in its transmission and so far as possible establish its original form. Most of what we know about the ancient world comes from written sources, and textual criticism is therefore fundamental to the study of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Latin Textual Criticism is unprecedented in its scope and detail. It covers textual transmission in antiquity and the middle ages, the history of the subject and its most important practitioners, and methodological and practical aspects of textual criticism and editorial technique. It includes four case studies and, unlike most other treatments of the subject, deals also with textual criticism of inscriptions and papyri.

Full Product Details

Author:   Prof Wolfgang David Cirilo de Melo (Professor of Classical Philology, Professor of Classical Philology, Wolfson College, University of Oxford) ,  Dr Scott Scullion (Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Worcester College, University of Oxford)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
ISBN:  

9780198738121

ISBN 10:   0198738129
Pages:   592
Publication Date:   23 April 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   To order  

Table of Contents

Scott Scullion: Introduction I. Ancient Texts and Textual Criticism 1: Amin Benaissa: Ancient Writing (Greek) 2: J. N. Adams: Ancient Writing (Latin) 3: Jane Lightfoot: Ancient Books 4: Daniela Colomo: Ancient Textual Criticism (Greek) 5: Anna Chahoud: Ancient Textual Criticism (Latin) 6: T. V. Evans: Textual Criticism of Greek Papyri 7: Robert Parker: Textual Criticism of Greek Inscriptions 8: Wolfgang de Melo: Textual Criticism of Roman Inscriptions II. Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Criticism 9: Nigel Wilson: Greek Palaeography and Textual Criticism 10: Nigel Wilson: Byzantine Textual Criticism 11: Richard Tarrant: Latin Palaeography and Textual Criticism 12: Marc Laureys: Medieval Latin Textual Criticism III. Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Textual Criticism 13: Hartmut Wulfram: Textual Critics and Criticism of the Italian Renaissance 14: Leofranc Holford-Strevens: Valla and Politian 15: Kurt Sier: Textual Critics and Criticism of the French Renaissance 16: Scott Scullion: J. J. Scaliger 17: Marc Laureys: Textual Critics and Criticism in the Southern Low Countries: From Erasmus to Justus Lipsius IV. Development of Critical Method 18: Scott Scullion: Textual Criticism in the Seventeenth to Twentieth Centuries 19: Richard Tarrant: Nicolaus Heinsius 20: Richard Tarrant: Richard Bentley 21: Scott Scullion: Gottfried Hermann 22: Wolfgang de Melo: Karl Lachmann 23: Wolfgang de Melo: J. N. Madvig 24: Luuk Huitink: C. G. Cobet 25: David Butterfield: A. E. Housman V. Aspects of Textual Criticism 26: Richard Tarrant: Recension 27: Gerd V. M. Haverling: Indirect Tradition 28: P. J. Finglass: Papyri and the Textual Criticism of Greek Authors 29: Jane Lightfoot: Problems of Authenticity 30: S. J. Heyworth: Lacunae 31: S. J. Heyworth: Interpolation 32: S. J. Heyworth: Transposition 33: Richard Tarrant: Emendation 34: Wolfgang de Melo: Metre and Prose Rhythm VI. Aspects of Editing 35: Lyndsay Coo: Conventions of Editing and the Apparatus Criticus 36: Giuseppe Pezzini: Orthography 37: Costas Panayotakis: Fragments 38: Christina M. Kreinecker: New Testament Textual Criticism and Editorial Challenges: Some General Observations 39: Caroline Macé and Jost Gippert: Textual Criticism and Editing in the Digital Age VII. Case Studies 40: Richard Janko: Homer 41: David Kovacs: Euripides' Iphigenia Aulidensis 42: Walter Stockert: Plautus' Cistellaria 43: Wolfgang de Melo: Varro

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Author Information

Scott Scullion is Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Worcester College, University of Oxford. A native of Toronto in Canada, he studied for his BA at the University of Toronto and for the PhD at Harvard University. He taught at Union College in Schenectady, New York from 1989 to 2003 and joined Worcester College and the Oxford Faculty of Classics in 2003. He has published on Greek religion, Greek tragedy, Herodotus, and Greek literary history. Wolfgang de Melo is Professor of Classics at the University of Oxford. He has written The Early Latin Verb System: Archaic Forms in Plautus, Terence, and Beyond (OUP 2007), Plautus: Comedies (5 vols., HUP 2011-13), Varros De lingua Latina: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary (2 vols., OUP 2019), and Latin Linguistics: An Introduction (De Gruyter 2024).

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