Item 87 - Letter from Kenneth Sisam to W. W. Greg

The Clarendon Press, Oxford.—Maas was pleased with Greg’s comments on McKerrow’s Prolegomena and suggests he read Housman’s Manilius.

—————

Transcript

The Clarendon Press, Oxford
11 November, 1940.

Please quote 4641/K.S.

My dear Greg,

Maas, who is very keen on the theory of textual criticism, was greatly pleased with your comments on McKerrow’s Prolegomena, and will later on offer some comments on the points at issue. He asked whether you had Housman’s Manilius Vol. I because sections IV and V challenge the sacredness of the copytext. This caused me to read Housman’s Introduction, which I began with great pleasure in his wit and brilliance, but ended with distaste because of his ill-concealed malevolence, which is not often found in great scholars.

Yours sincerely,
Kenneth Sisam

Dr. W. W. Greg.

—————

Typed, except the signature and a comma.

{1} Paul Maas, the German classical scholar and Byzantinist, was the author of an influential work on textual criticism first published in German as Textkritik (Taubner: Leipzig and Berlin, 1927), when it formed Part VII of Gercke-Norden’s Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft, Vol. I. An English translation by Barbara Flower was published in 1958 under the title Textual Criticism. When Maas fled Nazi Germany in 1939 Sisam arranged for a post to be created for him at the Clarendon Press. He was briefly interned on the Isle of Man in the summer of 1940 (ODNB), but evidently returned to the OUP shortly afterwards.