My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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.