Classics and the Study of the Book

Addressing questions of scholarly background, this chapter finds common ground among the related fields of book history, bibliography, textual criticism, and the Classics, so that readers from each may approach the book on equal footing. It foregrounds the fundamental methodology of Empire of Letters—to study classical texts book historically—and outlines one of the major outcomes of such an approach: that studying the ancient book as “old media” helps to distill the fundamental properties of the “book,” above and beyond the printed codex. Changes in modern media offer an intriguing parallel in the expansion of the conventional Western definition of “book.”