The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology (review)

We have entered the Age of the Handbook. Whatever the subject, and however limited the audience, a handbook on that subject, and in Classics more often two or three (one from each of the major presses with a stake in Classics publications) is bound to appear. And libraries are bound to buy them. What is not clear is how useful they are or who actually reads them. But should you have a layperson’s interest in papyrology, this is the place to go. It features brief histories of the materials and conservation, the search for papyri (aka “excavation,” though more accurately described as rummaging), a history of the discipline, and useful information about the arcana of editing and publishing papyrological texts. Less useful are the chapters on subjects like “papyri and early Christianity” that could easily generate their own separate handbooks and cannot be conveniently summarized in a few thousand words. Despite attempts to integrate papyrology into the wider field of Classics, this Handbook de facto reinforces boundaries, by asking papyrologists to write the chapters on “papyrology and ancient literature” or “writing histories from papyri.” And despite contributions that discuss the “multilingual environment,” this is a handbook not of papyrology, but of Greek papyrology that for the most part ignores the material written in demotic Egyptian. There is no discussion of the relative proportion of Greek to other languages at various find sites, how much non-Greek material was disgarded or ignored, or of Greek materials found in Egyptian environments and vice versa. In this respect it fairly represents the disciplinary status quo.