Christopher Stray

Readers of this book would be well advised to have scuba gear. They're going to have to dive deep.

There are accessible volumes of A. E. Housman's scholarly works, such as John Carter's collection A. E. Housman: Selected Prose. This isn't such a book. Nor is it an overview of what Housman worked on -- not really. Instead, it is a series of essays by modern scholars getting into the details of what he did. Housman's life work was editing the texts of classical Latin writers, and his work in that field was noteworthy for two things: His insistence on using the stemmatic methods pioneered by Karl Lachmann (in which Housman was dead right, and the people he fulminated against dead wrong -- sez I) and his extreme willingness to engage in conjecture -- that is, instead of adopting a reading found in (some subset of) the manuscripts, to adopt one that he felt fitting. That conjecture is sometimes necessary can hardly be denied. That Housman went overboard with it is almost as certain.

But to know just how far he went, you have to know Latin, and Latin authors, and the techniques of textual criticism -- and, frankly, you have to know Housman's work on the editions involved. It's a very high bar; the random fan of Housman's poetry will surely find this book incomprehensible. Even knowing a good bit about textual criticism, I found most of it to be pretty meaningless -- I don't know enough about (say) Manilius's writing style, and the vocabulary of ancient astrology, and the forms of ancient poetry to be able to judge whether one of Housman's conjecture is necessary.

This book appears to be a print-on-demand edition (at least, the print quality is pretty poor, and has the ragged-edged type of most print-on-demand books). I suspect its extreme specialization is the reason: The demand for it is just too small for anyone to want to keep copies on the shelf. Housman was a very important textual critic, still widely quoted in manuals of the subject. (Mostly because he was so quick with a fierce, and often unfair, quip.) His methods deserve to be studied. But unless you are a critic of Latin literature yourself, you aren't likely to get much out of this book.… (altro)