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From Book to Text: Towards a Comparative History of Philologies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Christian Jacob  and
Juliet Vale
Christian Jacob
Affiliation:
CNRS, Centre Louis Gernet, Paris
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Extract

Our methods of research, duly elaborated hereafter, would benefit from being applied to the realm of the East. For that matter, the examination of Syriac, Armenian, Coptic or Arabic manuscripts does not differ in the least from that of a Greek or Latin manuscript. The rules developed by classical philologists are just as valid for the study of the Maxims of Phtahhotep and the Precepts of Kagemeni…

Alphonse Dain (1975), Les Manuscrits (Paris, Les Belles Lettres)

One of the objects of a comparative history of the scholarly practices in the West, the Far East, the Arab world and classical antiquity is the role of libraries in the constitution, transmission and transformations of the great textual corpora. To the institutional and social aspects of the politics of social memory should be added the range of intellectual and technical practices which have as their aim the conservation of this inheritance: material conservation and transmission - copying texts, restoring them, transferring them from one medium, one script and one language to another - but also work on the literal level and the meaning, the content and the form.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 47 , Issue 186 , June 1999 , pp. 4 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 1999

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References

Notes

1. Notable among the works on the library at Alexandria are P.M. Fraser (1972 repr. 1998) Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford, Clarendon Press), esp. ch. 6; L. Canfora (1990) The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press); idem. (1992) La Bibliothèque d'Alexandrie et l'histoire des textes (Université de Liège, Centre de documentation de papyrologie littéraire).

2. Strabo, Geography, 13. 1. 27; Plutarch, Life of Alexander, 8. 2.

3. For a critique of the assumptions of modem philology from a medievalist's point of view, see B. Cerquiglini (1989) Éloge de la variante: histoire critique de la philologie (Paris, Éditions du Seuil). See also the essential work by G. Nagy (1996) Poetry as Performance. Homer and Beyond (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), which defines the successive phases of the history of the text of Homer: orality, transcript, script, writing.

4. The best account of the entirety of this scholarly activity within the Alexandrian Library remains the book by R. Pfeiffer (1968) History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford, Clarendon Press).

5. See e.g. G. Pasquali (1974) Storia della tradizione e critica del testo (Milan, Mondadori), 266-9, 278, on the reference to editions of Atticus in the manuscript traditions of Plato and Demosthenes.

6. Cerquiglini (1989) 43.

7. Des Alexandries: du livre au texte. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 23-5 June 1999. A second symposium, Des Alexandries: les métamorphoses du lecteur, will take place at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, 27-30 Nov. 1999.

8. For a primary outline of these practices, see C. Jacob (1996) Lire pour écrire: navigations alexandrines, in M. Baratin and C. Jacob (eds.), Le pouvoir des bibliothèques: la mémoire des livres en Occident (Paris, Albin Michel), 47-83.

9. See P. Nelles (1996) ‘Juste Lipse et Alexandrie: les origines antiquaires de l'histoire des bibliothèques', in M Baratin and C. Jacob (eds.), Le pouvoir des bibliothèques, 224-42.

10. See A. Grafton (1997) Commerce with the Classics. Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press), ch. 1.

11. John F. D'Amico (1988) Theory and Practice in Renaissance Textual Criticism: Beatus Rhenanus between Con jecture and History (Berkeley, University of California Press), 13; Grafton (1997), 22-3.

12. See the factors conveyed in E.J. Kenney (1974) The Classical Text. Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book (Berkeley, University of California Press), 86-91.

13. A.E. Housman (1972) The application of thought to textual criticism, in The Classical Papers of A.E. Housman, ed. J. Diggle and F.R.D. Goodyear, 3 vols. continuously paginated (Cambridge, University Press), 1069.

14. I rely here on the book of Régis Blachère (1959 repr. 1991) Introduction au Coran, 2nd edn (Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose).

15. I follow here the excellent synthesis of Anne Cheng (1984) La Trame et la Chaine: Aux origines de la constitution d'un corpus canonique au sein de la tradition confucéenne, Extrême Orient/Extrême Occident, 5, 13-26. This text anticipates her book (1985) Études sur le Confucianisme Han: l'élaboration d'une tradition exégétique sur les Classiques (Paris, Institut des hautes études chinoises.

16. See S. Cherniack (1994) Book culture and textual transmission in Sung China, HJAS, 54, 15-17.

17. Confucius, Analects, VII. 1 (2) (trans. A. Cheng).

18. Chemiack (1994), 19-21.

19. See Jean-Pierre Drège (1991) Les classifications bibliographiques, in J.-P. Drège, Les bibliothèques en Chine au temps des manuscripts (jusqu'au Xe siècle) (Paris, Publications de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient, 161), ch. 2.

20. For an account of research on Alexandrian philology, see (in addition to R. Pfeiffer's book), the collective volume, Franco Montanari (ed.) (1994) La philologie grecque à l'époque hellénistique et romaine: sept exposés suivis de discussions (Fondation Hardt, vol. 40), as well as J. Irigoin (1997) Tradition et critique des textes grecs (Paris, Les Belles Lettres), esp. 245-64. See also his contribution to this issue of Diogenes.

21. See F. Montanari (1997) The fragments of Hellenistic scholarship, in G.W. Most (ed.), Collecting Fragments/ Fragmente sammeln (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht), 273-88.

22. See Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, issue 2, co-ordinated by Jean-Marc Châtelain (Paris, June 1997), on the annotated book.

23. This history has been retraced by S. Timpanaro (1981) La genesi del metodo del Lachman, 2nd edn (Padua; 1st edn Florence, Le Monnier, 1963), which is followed here.

24. For this broader history, see G. Barsanti (1992) La scala, la mappa, l'albero. Immagini e classificazioni della natura fra Sei e Ottocento (Florence, Sansoni Editore).

25. See Cerquiglini (1989), 112-16.

26. I refer to the text in the English translation, which incorporates the changes of the third German edition: Paul Maas (1958) Textual Criticism, trans. Barbara Flower (Oxford, Clarendon Press).

27. This scheme is presented in exemplary fashion in Louis Havet (1911) Manuel de critique verbale appliquée aux textes latins (Paris, Hachette).

28. Cerquiglini (1989) 76.

29. Maas (1958), 20 (§ 21).

30. Cerquiglini (1989) 76.

31. Kenney (1974) 21-2.

32. Cited by D'Amico (1988) 34.

33. Cited by D'Amico (1988) 35.

34. See Cerquiglini (1989), who demonstrates the inadequacy of the categories of text and author applied to medieval literature.

35. See the remarks of D'Amico (1988), 23, on the criteria for the ‘consensus of authors' in Ermolao Barbaro (fifteenth century).