Rethinking the Classics: Novelties on Greek Textual Criticism, panel at the Conference in Classics & Ancient History, University of Coimbra, June 22–25, 2020

Textual criticism has been practiced for over two thousand years. Back in the Hellenistic Alexandria, actual textual critics were already concerned with preserving the works of antiquity, a task that was not interrupted through the medieval period into early modern times. A decisive moment would of course be the invention of the press, in the mid-fifteenth century. For all Europe, during the sixteenth century, several editorial houses where printing their critical editions of the Greek classics – take Homer, Plato, the Greek tragedies or the Greek Bible as example –, many times sponsoring Hellenists to collate the readings of several manuscripts, resulting their intensive work of recension and emendation in the making of yet more codices.

Especially after the acceptation of Browning’s rule (“recentiores non deteriores”, BICS 1960), the number of new editions of classical Greek texts has largely increased, aiming to include the readings of several codices, more and more known via the several authorized databases and even full reproductions online. Moreover, hundreds of texts lack for any inclusive critical edition, especially from the ones produced in Byzantine times.

The panel Rethinking the classics: novelties on Greek textual criticism aims to be an opportunity for presenting and discussing already completed or ongoing projects relating to (but not exclusively) any of the following topics:

• New manuscripts and their textual and historical importance;
• The need for new critical editions of previously edited Greek texts, in the light of recent paleographical findings;
• Never-before edited Greek texts from Byzantium: the desperate need for an editio princeps;
• Commentary on recent critical editions of Greek texts;
• History of Greek manuscripts.