Christ among the Doctors of the Law

 

 

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Consider Latin as an avocation, if not a career. Really.

This from Tore Janson, A Natural History of Latin (Oxford, 2004) at 122: "Thanks to the work of many generations of paleographers and textual critics we now have all the ancient texts in printed editions which are both easy to read and more correct than any of the surviving manuscripts. This is not, however, the case with texts from the Middle Ages, since there are many more of them [i.e., 100,000s] and they have attracted much less interest from Latin specialists. Many of them, even ones that are well worth reading, have been published using only one manuscript that happened to be to hand, even though much better manuscripts may exist. Many more texts have not been published at all, but are waiting in libraries for someone to read them and prepare an edition. There is a limitless amount of valuable work waiting to be done by those who would like to devote themselves to Latin and the Middle Ages."

Think about it. +++

Read more about it: Dr. Peters' Ecclesiastical Latin pages