Sachgebiete

Beschreibung:

XXX; 1105 S.; 24 cm. 3 Originalleinenbände.

Bemerkung:

Sehr gute Exemplare / 3 BÄNDE. - Englisch. // INHALT : Introduction ---- How to use the Dictionary ---- General bibliography ---- List of contributors ---- Biographical entries A-Z ---- Name index. // This dictionary had its origins in the wish of the Thoemmes Press to have a biographical resource to complement its plan to reprint works in the area of classical studies. But since there was no precedent for such a compendium, it was decided to make it as comprehensive and representative as possible. The chronological limits were set at 1500 and 1960, with the aim of including a wide range of individuals (to a maximum of around 700) who had contributed to the study and propagation of the Latin and Greek languages, and to the knowledge of Greek and Roman culture, between those dates. Subjects from the twentieth century would be those born by about 1920, with careers under way by 1960, and also deceased by 2000. The dictionary thus in effect stops at the 1960s, a decade which has come to represent the beginning of a process of change and transition in British classics as in so many other spheres. The heterogeneous group of individuals assembled on this basis is for the sake of brevity and convenience called 'classicists', a term designed to be capacious enough, here at least, ro cover schoolteachers and tutors, editors and translators, administrators and organizers, poets and novelists, publishers and printers, antiquarians and travellers, and researchers across the whole spectrum of classical studies. Our classicists, in other words, are not only scholars associated with institutes of advanced learning. In fact, British classicists, perhaps more than those in other countries, have led lives that they could not, and sometimes would not, limit to studying and teaching. Many might well be called hyphenated classicists, in their careers as clerics and theologians, bureaucrats, courtiers and politicians, and in rare cases as a businessman, a farmer or a banker, not to mention our one murderer, and the one Regius Professor of Greek whose political career ended in execution for treason. Our subjects are also British, in the extended sense that their careers were pursued primarily or significantly in Britain, a principle that allows the inclusion of refugee classicists who enriched and influenced modern British classical studies from the 1930s onwards, and whose lives were certainly not, as James Henry Monk said in 1823 in explaining his pioneering journal's neglect of biographies of classical scholars, 'destitute of such incidents as can greatly arrest the attention of their contemporaries or of posterity' (Museum Criticum, vol. 2, no. 8, p. 672). Working within these ground rules, contributors from Britain and some eight other countries have produced a work that is the first to collect in a single place biographies that were previously accessible, if at all, only in disparate sources - in learned journals and national biographical resources, specialized encyclopedias and institutional histories, as well as in anecdotal memoirs and the very occasional biography or autobiography. But inevitably the end product has some limitations that must be acknowledged. ? (Introd.) ISBN 1855069970