Classical Influences on European Culture A.D. 500-1500. Proceedings of an International Conference held at King's College, Cambridge, april 1969.

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1971. XVI,320p. Original blue cloth. spine with gilt titled vignette. 'Twenty-seven papers are included in this handsome publication of the proceedings, with an introduction by Dr. Bolgar summarizing and commenting on the results of the conference. Professor Gombrich, in his stimulating contribution on Personification which opened the proceedings, describes himself as feeling like Ignorance personified. A reviewer (...) faced with these diverse products of specialized scholarship may well have the same feeling. (...) Some knowledge of the history of manuscripts, their distribution and availability at different periods, is an essential foundation for the study of classical influences before the invention of printing; as one of the contributors remarks, scholars are still apt to ignore this and to find in a medieval writer echoes of a classical author who cannot have been known to him. Two of the papers give information about aids to such study, actual or projected. (...) other papers show how study of the history of texts can illuminate cultural history. (...) Dr. Bolgar rightly points out that there is much work still to be done, and work very relevant to the theme of the conference, on medieval education. Commentaries, which can be taken to reflect teaching methods, are part of the evidence, and they form the subject of two contributions. (...) Among the contributions which deal with the influence of classical literature P. Courcelle's on the survival of St. augustine's 'Confessions' and Boethius' 'Consolatiio' is satisfying comprehensive. (...) The group of papers on the influence of classical ideas opens with one by A.H. Armstrong on the influence of later Platonism which makes the point that we should distinguish between the different varieties of Platonism and individual characteristics. (...) The last two papers in the volume are on architecture. (...) Dr. Bolgar calls attention to the many gaps in our knowledge of the post-classical period, the lack of editions, or of good and accessible editions, of important texts, and of their contemporaries who wrote in Latin. The further exploration and critical analysis of medieval and Renaissance writers, he says, must be the modern Latinist's first task. (...) He is right in pointing to the possibilities of fruitful study in this field. At the same time some words of Professor Gombrich should not be forgotten: 'What makes it worth while to busy ourselves with the period between 500 and 1500 is not, after all, that it provides material for the academic industry, but that people of flesh and blood lived at the time whom we should like to understand.' (M.L. CLARKE in The Classical Review (New Series), 1973, pp.203-206). From the library of Professor Carl Deroux.