Humanist Philology and Reformation Controversy: John Christopherson’s Latin Translations of Philo Judaeus and Eusebius of Caesarea

Abstract

This essay focuses on the relationship between Latin translations and the authority of the Greek texts on which they were based. Groundbreaking Greek editions, arguably the greatest scholarly achievement of the sixteenth century, only initiated the contest over authoritative readings. Greek manuscripts were rare, their competing authority difficult to interpret, with translation hampered by increasingly apparent philological difficulties. Translation involved not only the striving after some equivalence of expression in the target language, but, for those who undertook to emend as they translated, critical engagement with the state of the source text. An editio princeps — the first printed edition of a work in its original classical language — instead of stabilizing a text, could instead foment debate of its authority. Those with access to manuscripts other than those on which the printed edition depended could contest the readings and carp over misleading representation of the author. Moreover, translations based on these printed texts could be subject to related charges. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 41 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.