I have been reading a book by Eleanor Dickey: Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatise, from Their Beginning to the Byzantine Period, and I was just wonder if there is an equivalent to this kind of book for Latin? Because Ancient Greek Scholarship is a fascinating and very detailed book, and I highly recommend it, and it would be awesome if such a fine work existed for Latin. Or maybe something similar. Anyone of you guys maybe knows of such one?
Perhaps the closest thing to an equivalent on the Latin side is a magnificent book edited by L.D. Reynolds, Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (1983). This has a lengthy intro on the history of the transmission of Latin texts, followed by expert specialist articles on the textual tradition of individual Latin authors. But unlike Dickie’s book its focus is not ancient scholarship (the so-called “secondary literature”) but the textual history of the inherited texts themselves.
Both books are exceptionally well informed, indispensable to anyone interested in the history of our texts.
But probably more useful for non-specialists is Reynolds and Wilson’s wide-ranging Scribes and Scholars (3rd ed.), esp. the first chapter. Highly recommended.
