R. A. B. Mynors

Sir Roger Aubrey Baskerville Mynors FBA (28 July 1903 – 17 October 1989), often cited as R. A. B. Mynors, was an English classicist, textual critic, and medievalist who held the senior chair of Latin at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He is most renowned for his contribution to the study of manuscripts, from which most classical texts are reconstructed.

For the politicians, see Roger Mynors (MP).

Sir

R. A. B. Mynors

FBA
Roger Mynors
Born(1903-07-28)28 July 1903
Wiltshire, England
Died17 October 1989(1989-10-17) (aged 86)
near Hereford, Herefordshire, England
CitizenshipBritish
Spouse(s)Lavinia Alington
Academic background
EducationEton College
Alma materBalliol College, Oxford
Influences
Academic work
DisciplineClassics
Institutions
Influenced

Mynors' academic career spanned most of the 20th century and straddled both of England's two oldest universities. Having been educated at Eton College, he read Classics at Balliol College, Oxford, and spent the early stages of his academic career as a fellow of the college. He later served as the Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge from 1944 to 1953 and as the Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at Oxford from 1953 to 1970. He died in a car accident on the way to his country residence in 1989.

At the time of his death in 1989, Mynors had earned a reputation as one of Britain's foremost classicists.[1] An expert on palaeography, he has been credited with unravelling a number of highly complex manuscript relationships in his catalogues of the Balliol and Durham Cathedral libraries. However, his best known publications are critical editions of the works of Vergil, Catullus, and Pliny the Younger. The final accomplishment of his lengthy career was a comprehensive commentary on Vergil's Georgics. In addition to honorary degrees and fellowships from various institutions, Mynors was knighted for his service to classical scholarship in 1963.

Early life and secondary education

Mynors was born into a family of gentry in the south-west of England.[2] The Mynors family had owned the estate of Treago Castle since the 16th century and he would reside there in his later life. His mother was Margery Musgrave, and his father, Aubrey Baskerville Mynors, was an Anglican clergyman and rector of Langley Burrell in Wiltshire, who in 1908 had been secretary to the Pan-Anglican Congress. Among his four siblings was his identical twin brother Humphrey Mynors, who went on to become Deputy Governor of the Bank of England.[3] The brothers shared a close friendship and lived together in their ancestral home after Roger's retirement.[4] Humphrey died just months before his brother's death in 1989.[5]

He attended Summer Fields School in Oxford, and from 1916, attended Eton College as a scholar. At Eton, he was part of a generation of pupils that included the historian Steven Runciman and the author George Orwell. His precocious interest in Latin Literature and its transmission was fostered by the encouragement of two of his teachers, Cyril Alington and M. R. James. Alington in particular became an influential mentor and friend since he shared with Mynors a fascination for the manuscript traditions of medieval Europe [6]

Academic career

Balliol College, Oxford

In 1922, Mynors won an exhibition to study classics at Balliol College, Oxford.[7] Sharing the college with the literary critic Cyril Connolly, musicologist Jack Westrup, the future Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Walter Fraser Oakeshott, and the historian Richard Pares, he experienced a highly successful time as an undergraduate.[8] Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1926, he won the Hertford, Craven, and Derby scholarships.[7] He then was elected to a fellowship at the same college and became a tutor in Classics. In 1935 he was elevated to a University Lecturership. At the time of his university appointment, much of Mynors' teaching was dedicated to the poet Vergil, whose complete works he would edit over the course of the following decades.[9]

Treago Castle, the Mynors family's country residence

His tenure at Oxford University saw the beginning of his comprehensive work on medieval manuscripts. From the late 1920s onwards, Mynors was drawn more to matters of codicology than to purely classical questions. He prepared an edition of the 6th century scholar Cassiodorus,[1] for which he travelled extensively to continental Europe; a critical edition was published in 1937. In 1929, he was appointed librarian of Balliol College. This position gave impetus to create a catalogue of the college's medieval manuscripts. A similar project, a catalogue of the manuscripts housed at Durham Cathedral, was compiled in the 1930s. Mynors' interest in codicology gave rise to a close co-operation with medievalists Richard William Hunt and Neil Ripley Ker.[10]

In 1936, near the end of his tenure at Balliol, Mynors made the acquaintance of Eduard Fraenkel, who had been elected to a chair of Latin at Oxford. Having relocated to England because of the increasing discrimination of German Jews, Fraenkel was a leading exponent of Germany's scholarly tradition. His influence contributed to Mynors' transformation from a gentleman-scholar to a professional critic of Latin texts. Since the two men maintained a close friendship,[11] Mynors became well placed to exhibit the virtues of both the British and the German tradition in his academic work.[12]

Mynors spent the winter of 1938 as a visiting scholar at Harvard University.[13] In 1940, after a brief return to Balliol, British involvement in the Second World War led to his being employed at the Exchange Control Department of the Treasury.[7] At Balliol, Mynors taught from 1926 until 1944, a time during which he taught many future scholars, including the Wittgenstein expert David Pears.[14]

Pembroke College, Cambridge

In 1944, encouraged by Fraenkel,[15] Mynors took up an offer to assume the Kennedy Professorship of Latin at the University of Cambridge.[16] He also became a fellow of Pembroke College. The move to Cambridge meant a significant advance of his academic career, but he soon came to contemplate a return to Oxford.[17] In 1949 he applied unsuccessfully to become master of Balliol College, but the historian David Keir was elected in his stead.[7] In 1945, shortly after moving to Cambridge, he married Lavinia Alington, daughter of his former teacher and Eton headmaster Cyril Alington. The couple had no children.[18]

His post at Cambridge caused changes to Mynors' profile as an academic. His duties at Balliol had centred on the supervision of undergraduates, while he was free to focus on palaeographical topics in his research. At Cambridge, Mynors was required to lecture extensively on Latin literature and to supervise research students, a task of which he had little experience. The duties of his university post left little time to get involved in the activities of the college, which led Mynors to regret his departure from Oxford, going so far as to describe the decision as a "fundamental error" in a personal letter.[17]

Although his post was chiefly that of a Latinist, his involvement in the publication of medieval texts intensified during the 1940s. After he was approached by V. H. Galbraith, a historian of the Middle Ages, Mynors became an editor on Nelson's Medieval Texts series in 1946. Working on the series in several roles, he served as the principal editor of editions of Walter Map's De nugis curialium and of Bede's Ecclesiastical History.[19]

Corpus Christi College, Oxford

In 1953, Mynors was appointed Corpus Christi Professor of Latin and could thus return to his alma mater to succeed Eduard Fraenkel. At the time, there was no precedent for such a move.[18] Most of his work as an editor of Latin texts took place during this second period at Oxford. Working for the Oxford Classical Texts series, he produced critical editions of the complete works of Catullus (1958) and Vergil (1969), and of Pliny the Younger's Epistulae (1963). In the 17 years he spent at the college, Mynors sought to maintain its position as a centre of excellence in the Classics and fostered contacts with a new generation of Latinists, including E.J. Kenney, Wendell Clausen, Leighton Durham Reynolds, and Michael Winterbottom.[12]

Retirement and death

In 1970, Mynors retired from his teaching duties and relocated to his estate at Treago Castle. Though he cultivated leisurely pursuits, such as arboriculture and a stamp collection, his retirement saw work on a commentary on Vergil's Georgics, which appeared posthumously in 1990. He also maintained an interest in the nearby Hereford Cathedral.[20]

On 17 October 1989, Mynors was killed in a road accident outside Hereford on his way back from a day working on the cathedral's manuscripts.[7] As he left the building he was heard to say that he had had a good day.[7] He was survived by his wife Lavinia[18] and buried at St Weonards.[7]

The cathedral's Honorary Archivist later revealed that Mynors had on the same day expressed his delight about his own scholarly work on the death of Bede: "He told me he was glad that he had translated for the Oxford Medieval Texts the account of Bede's death, and that Bede had not ceased in what he saw as his work for God until the very end."[21]

Legacy

During his career, Mynors gained a reputation as one of the leading Latinists of his generation. His chief interest lay in palaeography, the study of pre-modern manuscripts. He has been credited with unravelling a number of highly complex manuscript relationships in his catalogues of the Balliol and Durham Cathedral libraries.[18]

Mynors has been described as a distinguished editor of Latin texts by fellow Classicists,[22][2] an activity aided by his mastery of palaeography. His Oxford editions of the poets Catullus and Vergil in particular have proved important contributions to the field:[23] they still serve as the standard editions of their texts in the early 21st century.[24] In 1983, on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Mynors' service to the study of Latin texts was honoured by the publication of Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, edited by the Oxford Latinist L. D. Reynolds. Because of his reluctance to emend beyond the transmitted readings, he has been described as a conservative textual critic.[18] This approach is thought to have originated in Mynors' tendency to ascribe great historical value to manuscripts and their scribes.[7]

His scholarly legacy was enhanced by his posthumous commentary on Vergil's Georgics. A comprehensive guide to Vergil's didactic poem on agriculture, the commentary has been lauded for its meticulous attention to technical detail and for Mynors' profound knowledge of agricultural practice.[25] In spite of its accomplishments, critics have also noted that the commentary fails to engage seriously with contemporary scholarship on the text,[26] such as the tension between optimistic and pessimistic readings.[27] In this regard, Mynors' last work reflects his lifelong scepticism towards literary criticism of any persuasion.[27]

Honours

Mynors was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1944 and was knighted in 1963. He was granted honorary fellowships by Balliol College, Oxford (1963), Pembroke College, Cambridge (1965), and Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1970). The Warburg Institute honoured him in the same way.[27] Mynors was also an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani (it). He held honorary degrees from the universities of Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Sheffield, and Toronto.[28]

References
  1. "Sir Roger Mynors. Distinguished Latinist". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 August 2020. (subscription required)
  2. Gotoff 1991, p. 309.
  3. Winterbottom 1993, p. 371.
  4. Winterbottom 1993, p. 393.
  5. "Sir Humphrey Mynors, Obituary". The Times. 26 May 1989.
  6. Winterbottom 1993, p. 373–4.
  7. Nisbet 2004.
  8. Winterbottom 1993, p. 374–5.
  9. Winterbottom 1993, p. 375.
  10. Winterbottom 1993, p. 377–80.
  11. Gotoff 1991, p. 310–11.
  12. Gotoff 1991, p. 311.
  13. Winterbottom 1993, p. 381.
  14. Peacocke, Christopher (14 April 2016). "Pears, David Francis, 1921–2009". British Academy. Retrieved 25 July 2020.
  15. Winterbottom 1993, p. 382.
  16. Gotoff 1991, p. 310.
  17. Winterbottom 1993, p. 383.
  18. "Sir Humphrey Mynors, Obituary". The Times. 19 October 1989.
  19. Winterbottom 1993, p. 384–8.
  20. Winterbottom 1993, p. 393–6.
  21. Winterbottom 1993, p. 395.
  22. Winterbottom 1993, p. 389.
  23. Maguinness 1971, p. 200.
  24. Trappes-Lomax 2007, p. 2.
  25. Williams 1992, p. 89.
  26. Johnston 1991.
  27. Winterbottom 1993, p. 396.
  28. "Roger Mynors". New York Times. 21 October 1989.

Works cited

Selected publications
Academic offices
Preceded by
William Blair Anderson		 Kennedy Professor of Latin
Cambridge University
1944 to 1953		 Succeeded by
C.O. Brink
Preceded by
Eduard Fraenkel		 Corpus Christi Professor of Latin
University of Oxford
1953 to 1970		 Succeeded by
Robin Nisbet
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