"Continuing its undeniable contribution to the study of the transmission and reception of Greek and Latin texts, the fourteenth volume of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, edited by Greti Dinkova-Bruun, offers an exceptional overview of the fortune of Lucian of Samosata from Antiquity to the early modern period. The detailed information on manuscripts, printed editions, commentaries, and translations - both into Latin and the vernacular - assembled by Keith Sidwell is complemented by extensive quotations of paratextual material, thus providing remarkable insight into the complexity of the reception of Lucian's works. The volume opens with a comprehensive Introduction, in which an account of diverse approaches is presented, and concludes with a Conspectus of Translations, useful for navigating the large amount of the material gathered. Overall, it is a monumental contribution to our understanding of the sophist's pedagogical and literary influence, from Byzantium to early modern Europe, and will undoubtedly become an indispensable reference work for any student of the classical tradition." -- Maria Luisa Resende, Universidade Catolica Portuguesa
"Keith Sidwell's 'Lucianus Samosatensis' for the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum is a landmark achievement in the study of the classical tradition. Confronting a corpus of exceptional scale and complexity, Sidwell combines meticulous bibliographical precision with a clear, highly usable structure. The volume proceeds in broadly chronological sequence while grouping translations and commentaries by individual scholars, enabling readers to trace Lucian's afterlife not only work by work, but also through the careers, intellectual networks, and scholarly environments that carried his writings across centuries. Sidwell follows Lucian from the earliest stages of Greek learning in Renaissance Italy, where his works served as key classroom texts, through the explosion of Latin translation, commentary, and print circulation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and into the wider phenomenon of Lucianism in European literary and cultural history down to the present. Along the way, he assembles and clarifies an extraordinary body of evidence: hundreds of manuscripts, hundreds of printed editions, and a dense web of paratexts through which early modern readers interpreted Lucian's value and purpose. The book's detailed conspectuses make visible at a glance which works circulated where, in what languages, and under whose names, offering an indispensable map of a tradition in which texts often travelled independently and translators and commentators worked across decades. Sidwell's most important contribution, however, lies in transforming immense documentation into interpretive clarity: correcting misattributions, refining dates and provenance, and illuminating the pedagogical and scholarly conditions that made Lucian central to the revival of Greek. With its expansive, carefully cross-referenced catalogue - strengthened by links to digitized copies - this volume stands as both a foundation and a gateway for future scholarship in Classics, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Translation History, and Reception research." -- Ioannis Deligiannis, Democritus University of Thrace
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