Scholars of Byzantium

"A learned and fascinating book" - D. M. Nichol, Times Higher Educational Supplement "Amazingly rich in information...it provides a magisterial overview of a field of interest to the classicist and the Renaissance scholar as well as to the professed Byzantinist and will take its place as a classic introduction to the intellectual world of the Greek Middle Ages." - Robert Browning, Times Literary Supplement Classical Greek literature survives to be read today largely because the Byzantines preserved it. The copies they transcribed by hand now belong to libraries in places as far apart as New York and Erevan, Leningrad and Mount Sinai. The maintenance of such a corpus of literature in an age which had no printing press required a high degree of enthusiasm and skill. In the course of his research Nigel Wilson has examined not only the critical operations of Byzantine scholars and the essays they wrote about ancient authors but several hundred manuscripts copied by various classes of readers. Scholars of Byzantium was the first serious study of the attempts of educated men to preserve Classical Greek texts and apply to them the methods of scholarship developed in the ancient world.