The Marriage of Philology and Scepticism: Uncertainty and Conjecture in Early Modern Scholarship and Thought ed. by Gian Mario Cao, Anthony Grafton, and Jill Kraye (review)

A conference held in 2012 gives rise to this various and well produced collection. A theme that might not, perhaps, serve to hold together a monograph with con- viction nonetheless permits the collection of interesting, and sometimes important studies. Some contributions are fuller than others; some authors provide medita- tions on the volume’s themes that arise from a career’s various reading; other authors, by contrast, take advantage of the opportunity to present the results of sub- stantial focused research. But the results are never less than interesting, and the collection is probably the better for no single strong editorial line having been imposed on how to understand the claims of scepticism in relation to philology.

The chronological centre of gravity of the collection falls in the two centuries around the year 1600. But it opens with two preliminary offerings considering earlier moments. Glenn W. Most (‘Sextus Empiricus, Child of the Marriage of Philology and Scepticisms’) concisely considers the claims of Sextus Empiricus in relation to the volume’s two themes, arriving at a reading of his Against the Grammarians which concludes that even Sextus does not really put philology into doubt, for he did not think it worth doing so. Of all the authors Jan M. Ziolkowski (‘Medieval Precedents for Sceptical Philology’) perhaps follows what he takes to be his brief most closely, not least in offering an intelligent and thought-provoking general introduction that the volume otherwise lacks. His reassessment of the pos- sibility for medieval scepticism before scholasticism emphasizes the stimulus pro- vided by St Augustine’s preoccupation with refuting the ‘academics’ before turning to consider the case-studies of the Carolingian Abbot Lupus of Ferrières (Servatus Lupus), whose unusual concern for collation and correction may perhaps—the author leaves the question open—be connected to his interest in obtaining a copy of Cicero’s Academica, and the idiosyncratically academically sceptical, and also philological, John of Salisbury (who nonetheless did not know Cicero’s Academica directly).

Two essays on sixteenth-century textual editing emphasize philology, and the doubts it raises, and do not concern themselves with philosophical scepticism. Jill Kraye (‘Coping with Philological Doubt: Sixteenth-Century Approaches to the Text of Seneca’) offers a thorough and fully evidenced account, laced with an arid wit, of problems faced by editors of Seneca prior to Justus Lipsius’s edition of 1605. She is especially interested in the language by which editors accounted for their decisions, and provides extensive exemplification of this. A rather different tack is taken by David Butterfield in a meticulous study in the English mode of Denys Lambin’s edition of Lucretius (‘Critical Method in Lambinus’s Lucretius: Collation and Inter- polation’). The core of this essay lies in its detailed and fascinating analysis of how Lambin handled and documented his manuscript witnesses; it also offers an analysis of Lambin’s cautious assessment of the possibility of textual interpolation. Butterfield finds that the ‘admirable critical principle’ of assessing Lucretius on the basis of Lucretius served him as ‘the surest rejection of textual scepticism’. The collations Butterfield has undertaken himself for this study result in the deepest account to date of Lambin’s editorial procedures.

Anthony Grafton (‘Divination: Towards the History of a Philological Term’) offers a wide-ranging and intellectually open prolegomenon towards a history of the philological idea of divinatio, with a cast that takes in Poggio, Gaspare da Verona, Erasmus, and Isaac Casaubon together with a host of minor players. Characteristi- cally, Grafton’s account emphasizes complexity—the necromantic art of divination did, and did not, give rise to the divination of the conjectural emendation; the claim of ‘divination’ occurs both as pejorative rejection of unfounded efforts...