English Classical Scholarship

Professor C.O. Brink's "English Classical Scholarship" is the first sustained treatment since the early years of this century of the historical development of English classical scholarship. Brink shows the effect of the Italian Renaissance on nascent English scholarship and examines the contribution made by 17th century scholars such as Bishop Pearson and Thomas Gataker. He deals at length with the life of Richard Bentley, his troubled careers master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and above all the immense advances he made in classical studies, which were in turn developed by Richard Porson. He also shows how, paradoxically, in the Victorian era, while a classical education was seen as the key to advancement, classical scholarship almost wholly stagnated. Although the tradition of Bentley and Porson all but disappeared in England, it was nurtured by the great German scholars of the nineteenth century. It was only with the work of A. E. Housman that the tradition of the greatest classical scholars returned to its native land and Professor Brink shows how it began again to make a contribution to the 'European fund'.

'In a series of concise and elegant essays, Brink directly confronts his greatest predecessors in the editor's art. The result is a historical work of a very high level' - Times Literary Supplement. 'Uncommonly well-written...Brink writes everywhere with a clarity of expression and subtlety of overtone that indicate a vast scholarship lightly worn' - Religious Studies Review. 'The chapter on Victorian classical education is important both for its own sake and for an understanding of Housman's contribution to modern classical studies...Both conception and execution are admirably lucid and introduce the layman to the two key works which survey the subject at an international level...Professor Brink's assessment of Housman's classical work and the analysis of his scholarship in relation to his views on poetry and literature provide the best combined study' - Times Higher Education Supplement. 'The text is a reprint of Brink's 1985 work discussing the contributions of these three thinkers to classical thinking. Born from a series of lectures, the tone of the essays is conversational and readable...' - Book News Inc, February 2011 'Classical education is one thing, critical scholarship is another, and in his sketch of the history of Classical education in England, built around a detailed treatment of its three most celebrated figures, Professor Brink is concerned above all to describe and to make a case for the element of critical scholarship that Classical education may contain.' Hugh Lloyd-Jones, London Review of Books, Vol. 9, No. 3, 5 February

C.O. Brink was Kennedy Professor Emeritus of Latin at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. His magnum opus is a three-volume study, Horace on Poetry.