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xi PREFACE TO VOLUME I The present volume is the first of a series that will list and describe the Latin translations of ancient Greek authors and the Latin commentaries on ancient Latin (and Greek) authors up to the year 1600. The work is planned as a contribution to the history of classical scholarship. It is intended to illustrate the impact which the literary heritage of ancient Greece and Rome had upon the literature, learning, and thought of those long centuries of Western history usually known as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance . During that whole period, the acquaintance with, and the gradual appropriation of, this ancient literary heritage played a much more central and more productive role than has been true in more recent times, although the approach to this ancient material may have been imperfect, uncritical , and often wrong by present scholarly standards. Hence it is important to ascertain how much the Middle Ages, how much the Renaissance, how much each century or generation within those larger periods actually knew of the ancient Greek and Latin literatures. The widespread debate about the relative extent and merits of classical learning during those centuries can be settled only by a dispassionate , careful, and critical stocktaking of the relevant textual, documentary, or bibliographical evidence. We cannot merely examine such a vague and indistinct unit as ‘classical literature,’ but we must trace in detail the history and transmission of each ancient author, and of each of his writings. We must take ancient literature in the broadest possible sense, and include not merely the ‘classical’ authors of the earlier periods, but also their successors down to 600 A.d., and not only the poets and writers of literary prose, but also all authors, some of them obscure or anonymous, who wrote on philosophy or theology, on grammar or rhetoric, or on the various arts, sciences, or pseudo-sciences. All these subjects were to occupy an important place in the intellectual history of the later centuries, and they derived much of their subject matter, vocabulary, and method from the available ancient sources. Even within the area of poetry and belles-lettres, we must keep in mind that several authors now prominent were almost forgotten, and others now neglected occupied the center of attention. This fact will not disturb us, for we do not merely wish to find in the past the antecedents for our own interests, but also to know and understand the past in its own interests where they were different from ours. Perhaps the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in emphasizing certain aspects of ancient literature that have disappeared from the modern view, may even have grasped some authentic traits of antiquity. In other words, this work addresses itself to students of classical antiquity as well as of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance, to historians of literature as well as to historians of theology, philosophy, the sciences , and learning in general. Quite appropriately, scholars from all these fields have taken an active part in planning and carrying out this work. A complete study of classical scholarship during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, however , would include much material and many problems that are beyond the scope of our present undertaking,—e.g., the manuscript copies and printed editions in which a given text has been transmitted ; the many short glosses and notes that were added to the text by the copyists, editors, or readers of these manuscripts and printed editions; the many quotations from classical texts, direct or indirect , precise or distorted, that are found in the works of mediaeval or Renaissance writers; finally, the vernacular translations of ancient texts that were produced with increasing frequency down to the sixteenth century, and that as far as the works of Greek authors were concerned were usually based on Latin translations. Without denying the importance of all these matters for a study of classical scholarship in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, we have singled out for our work two groups of material that are more limited, but that occupy a central place in the transmission of ancient texts in the West: the Latin translations from the Greek, and the Latin commentaries on Greek, and especially on ancient Latin authors. The translations prove through their very existence that a given text was available at a given time, and through the number of manuscripts or editions, how widely it was available. xii preface to volume I During the period with which we are...

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