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This chapter takes the example of the Greek classical philologist Ioannis Sykoutris (1901–37) to show the interplay between classical scholarship and national discourses. Sykoutris's controversial edition of Plato's Symposium (1934) invites reflection on how the role of the classical scholar, with implications for national education, is in turn inscribed in the scholarly presentation and interpretation of classical works. In Greece, nationalism was and is tied to classical antiquity in a particularly strong and complex way; even so, a detailed reading of Sykoutris's often programmatic philology, which is in dialogue with his extensive German training, exemplifies how strands of argument underlying different national classical discourses in the early twentieth century link philology, the individual, and the nation in similar and transnational ways.

The introduction defines the Greek love novel, or ‘ideal’ novel, and considers its relation to other strains of Graeco‐Roman prose fiction. It reviews the history and the current relevance of enquiries into the origins of the Greek love novel and suggests a generic model based on individual emulations and variations as an alternative to the predominant idea of an abstract novelistic matrix. A description of the methodological approach of the book is provided, which consists of the combination of arguments from literary history on the one hand and from Chariton's poetics, implied in his metaliterary self‐references, on the other. A preview of the course of the investigation gives readers an idea of the main points to follow and helps them navigate through the following chapters.

E. A. Freeman’s distaste for Erastianism, his contempt for Whigs, and his equivocal interventions in debates on disestablishment and disendowment are well-attested. Yet the career of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815–81) reveals that Whig liberalism remained a historiographical force in Freeman’s time. Although Stanley was dismissed by Freeman as a slapdash historian, as dean of Westminster Abbey (1864–81) Stanley developed a vision of historical scholarship that could support an Erastian defence of established churches. Stanley curated the Abbey to show how the established church had been interwoven with the national past. There and elsewhere in Britain, he sought to pacify Nonconformist advocates of disestablishment by remembering their heroes as national not sectarian figures. This essay surveys Stanley’s energetic involvement in controversies over disestablishment and contrasts it with Freeman’s scholarly detachment, concluding that despite the differences between them, neither historian made much impact on Nonconformist minds.

Chapter One outlines the sources, methods, and goals of this project. Firstly, this chapter argues against the marginality of the expulsion narrative in early Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Garden of Eden narrative, and sets guidelines for the inclusion of a wide variety of citations and allusions to the expulsion. Secondly, this chapter proposes a methodological pluralism to examine the source text of Gen 3:22–24 and the later texts interpreting the expulsion. This use of multiple methodologies is essential to avoid privileging a theoretical “urtext,” or eliminating divergent interpretations as eisegetical. Finally, this project argues for the composite character of the redacted Garden of Eden in which the expulsion serves an ideological corrective to the independent pursuit of wisdom over and against the adherence to covenant and cult. The chapter argues this ideological insertion of the expulsion narrative is preserved as a foundational dialogue of the redacted text of Genesis 2–3, and provides a reasonable constraint to interpretations of it.

This chapter presents the first sustained study of Donne's reading and his scholarly methods, through paying detailed attention to his use of Saint Augustine's works. The chapter situates Donne's approach to Augustine in the context of Renaissance patristic scholarship and demonstrates the breadth and range of Donne's Augustinian reading. The chapter focuses on Donne's patristic sources: how many (and which) of Augustine's works he cited; whether Donne consulted the original Augustinian texts or intermediary sources, and how he dealt with these different types of patristic recourse. A survey is provided of the patristic editions that were available to divines in the early modern period, concentrating on the three sixteenth-century editions of Augustine's Works. The chapter then turns to Donne's philosophy of quotation, explaining his scholarly protocols, and the moral and theological thought which underpins them.

This chapter gives an overview of issues central to the interpretation of the Homeric Hymns, and provides a foundation for approaching the arguments advanced in the subsequent chapters of the book. Distinct sections examine the history of scholarship on the Hymns, the extent to which the poems can be considered examples of oral poetry, the Hymns' dates, circumstances of composition, language, and performance contexts.

A sketch of the previous research on the Qur’an is provided in detail. The overview of approaches and results in Western research goes back to the nineteenth century, following the story of Qur’an research first up to the Wissenschaft des Judentums (science of Judaism) school of the early twentieth century. Following this, more recent trends in Qur’an research, including the more source-critical and skeptical methods of recent decades, are described. Finally, a sketch of the diversity of current approaches is given, situating the approach of this volume within its relevant scholarly context.

The history of scholarship on the Essenes has been one embedded within a large project to define Judaism at the time of Jesus. This was generally done with underlying assumptions about the continuities between Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism, and displayed Christian bias, so that the Essenes were considered marginal to a mainstream that stood in continuity with later developments. A new paradigm of Second Temple Judaism allows for a more balanced assessment, with the Essenes placed rightly at the centre.

Interview with Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. Topics include intellectual history; historiography; history of scholarship; historical chronology; Joseph Scaliger; and the history of reading.

This chapter provides an overview of scholarship on Manilius’ Astronomica from the early twentieth century onward. After a discussion of editions and textual studies beginning with Housman, it considers the controversy over the Astronomica’s date (Augustan, Tiberian, or both?), before turning to scholarly work on Manilius’ political context; world view, astrology, and philosophy; genre, poetics, and intertextuality; and later reception. The chapter concludes with a section of suggested further readings, aimed at readers who are approaching the Astronomica for the first time.

This chapter examines the history of Walbank's engagement with Polybius and subsequently with his commentary on Polybius, whose origins and development towards publication is charted against the materials held in the archives of Oxford University Press, and against Walbank's career and his unpublished memoir, Hypomnemata. As well as showing how the history of scholarship can be illuminated by the study of publication practice, the sustained examination of correspondence between the Press and Walbank (and involving other scholars as well) demonstrates how Walbank's initial plan of writing on Tacitus' Histories came to metamorphose into a commentary on Polybius. His skilful correspondence with the Press over decades thus enabled him to ensure that his commentary had the necessary scale and physical scope of three substantial volumes that such a project of 'long-distance writing' needed.

This introductory chapter clarifies terminology, outlines the book's scope and rationale, reflects briefly on the state of play in skoptic epigram scholarship, and identifies some key methodological concerns: literary and cultural contextualisation (including material culture), political readings, and academic reception history. It flags up the importance of developing a methodologically supple and richly contextualised reading strategy, in response to the characteristic ambiguities which are fundamental to the process of skoptic humour.

The introduction establishes the centrality of the Bible to Protestant dissent. It begins by setting out the persistent claim by British dissenters that their theology, ecclesiology, worship and politics were biblical. It then turns to explore the ways in which such claims divided dissenters from one another as well as from the established churches. It also draws attention to the ambiguous standing of scholarship in their religious life, arguing that dissenters both valued such learning while also fearing that it might alienate their congregations or weaken their simple faith in the word of God. It discusses too the way in which dissenting women overcame barriers to their participation in such scholarship. It ends by demonstrating how social change and the absorption of dissenting scholars into mainstream academic life has entailed not just the numerical decline of dissent but the disappearance of its vibrant biblical culture.

This chapter uses the case study of the Congregational journalist and scholar Josiah Conder (1789-1855) to explore the sustained and pragmatic engagement of evangelical nonconformists with the orientalising study of the Bible in early nineteenth-century Britain. It has often been thought that the political and eschatological passions of British evangelicals in this period caused them to recoil from the study by German scholars of the Bible as an oriental text. Yet this picture turns out to be true mainly for evangelicals in the established churches. As intellectual leaders of evangelical nonconformity, Congregationalists found orientalising criticism useful in deriving support for their liberal politics and optimistic eschatology from the Bible. The chapter notes though that this enthusiasm was always qualified and that as the example of Conder’s sons shows it became markedly harder for Congregationalists to reconcile their interest in such criticism with their commitment to a scriptural politics from mid-century onwards.

Chapter 2 is a history of the scholarship on the Athenian Amnesty. It begins with a snapshot of the events based on Xenophon’s account and Andokides’ comments, a fragmentary picture that suggests some of the problems that scholars faced in the early nineteenth century as they reconstructed the ancient paradigm. The chapter traces the course of scholarly opinion, before and after the publication of Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (Ath. Pol.) in the 1890s, and then follows developments in the twentieth century. This history of scholarship suggests that the prevailing view of the Athenian Amnesty, that it was contained in a ‘law of oblivion’ or an act of political forgiveness, is rooted in the Romantic-era reception of Roman tradition, not in the Greek testimony close to the events.

This chapter deconstructs the textual evidence adduced by scholars attempting to establish the historical identities of Loukillios and Nikarkhos, and critiques their motivations. Stereotyped situational humour is not autobiography; the chapter argues that the ‘Loukillios’ and ‘Nikarkhos’ encountered in the text are personae, much as in Latin satire. The few quasi-autobiographical details they provide turn out to be allusions to other humorous texts. Loukillios' name must derive (by whatever route) from a Roman Lucilius, but the chapter argues that the identity debate has been unproductive. Attempts to pin down a historical Loukillios (or Loukillos, or Lucilius) are necessarily tenuous, and unnecessarily constrain reading strategies. The chapter also demonstrates that the named targets of their skoptic humour cannot be matched to individuals in the real world: they are stereotypes, and many of the names attached to them are repeatedly re-used in different contexts, for reasons including metrical convenience and humorous incongruity.