Friday, September 8, 2017

Van der Horst Review of Snapshots of Evolving Traditions

Pieter van der Horst has a sympathetic but critical review of Liv Ingeborg Lied, Hugo Lundhaug (ed.), Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology. I think he does a fair job appreciating the value of the material turn in philology, but also pushing back against the reductionistic idea that we should abandon all attempts at critical text reconstruction (as does Davila in the same volume). I would agree completely that Material Philology is an opportunity to expand the horizons of our scholarship, not an excuse to narrow them.