Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach

Description

In this collection of richly documented case studies, experts in many textual traditions examine the ways in which important texts were preserved, explicated, corrected, and used for a variety of purposes. The authors describe the multiple ways in which scholars in different cultures have addressed some of the same tasks, revealing both radical differences and striking similarities in textual practices across space, time and linguistic borders. This volume shows how much is learned when historians of scholarship, like contemporary historians of science, focus on earlier scholars' practices, and when Western scholarly traditions are treated as part of a much larger, cross-cultural inquiry.

Anthony Grafton teaches European history at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the history of classical scholarship, the history of science and the history of learning, from late antiquity to the twentieth century. Glenn W. Most is Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Visiting Professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. He has published numerous books and articles on classics; the history and methodology of classical studies; the classical tradition and comparative literature; modern philosophy and literature; literary theory; the history of science; and the history of art.

'... this transcultural investigation is the fruit of comparative and collaborative scholarship at its best. It is, to use the editors' coinage, a 'symphilological' achievement that will leave its readers with a habit of stopping to think about the particularity of scholarly practices and its implications for the history of ideas. All the contributions are lucidly written with a cross-disciplinary audience in mind and beautifully documented with images, tables, and transcriptions of the evidence discussed ... the choice to let the individual contributions speak for themselves, along with the work of comparison and juxtaposition germane to the textual practice of the essay collection, seems a forceful methodological statement for a project that places the case study at the heart of its epistemic undertaking.' Tania Demetriuo, Isis Review