L. D. Reynolds
Spending his entire teaching career at Brasenose College, Oxford, he prepared the most commonly cited edition of Seneca the Younger's Letters.
He also produced critical editions of Seneca's Dialogues, the works of the historian Sallust, and Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum.
In 1968, Reynolds and his Oxford colleague Nigel Guy Wilson co-authored Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, a well-received introduction to textual criticism.
Due to a short-lived regulation stipulating that holders of state scholarships attend the institution nearest to their hometown, he did not take up his place, enrolling instead at University College Cardiff in 1947.
[7] In 1952, after travelling to Greece, Reynolds began his national service at the Royal Air Force, where most of his time was spent studying Russian in a programme introduced by the linguist Elizabeth Hill.
[3] Reynolds played an active part in the college's governing body, where, according to the Brasenose fellow and chemist Graham Richards, he "held a position of quiet authority".
In an obituary in the Proceedings of the British Academy, the Latinist Michael Winterbottom wrote that Reynolds underwent oncological surgery in 1995 and was later treated at Churchill Hospital, Oxford.
[3] In the application for his position at Brasenose, Reynolds wrote that he had been working on the textual transmission of Seneca the Younger's Letters, and that he aimed to publish a new critical edition of the text together with a general survey of the topic.
[18] Writing for The Classical Review, the Latinist E. J. Kenney said that this conclusion was "an altogether Herculean feat" but added that it "hardly prepare[d]" readers for the large role these manuscripts played in editions of the Letters.
[19] Although he criticised a number of editorial aspects,[21] he concluded by writing that "[Reynolds's] edition will surely be for a long time to come the standard text of this undervalued work".
[4] Having identified the Codex Ambrosianus (A) as the most important source of the text, he relied heavily on it and drew on the readings of younger manuscripts only where A showed signs of corruption.
[25] According to the reviewer Daniel Knecht, Reynolds was more willing than previous editors to posit cruces in places where the text was irremediably corrupt and to delete passages he considered inauthentic.
[28] For Stephen Oakley, the Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge, the greatest merit of the edition was its judicious provision of readings from less reliable manuscripts, which has led to the solution of a difficult textual problem in chapter 114 of Sallust's Jugurtha.
[30] Published in 1998, the final critical edition of his career covered Cicero's philosophical text De finibus bonorum et malorum.
This work had been edited competently by the Danish classical scholar Johan Nicolai Madvig in 1839 but technological and methodological advances had necessitated a new rendition of the text.
[31] After publishing his work on Seneca's Letters, Reynolds collaborated with Nigel Guy Wilson, a Hellenist and fellow of the neighbouring Lincoln College, to produce a general introduction to the transmission of classical texts.
[33] The philologist Conor Fahy termed it an "excellent short manual" though he criticised the authors' assertion that Greek was the only language spoken in Southern Italy and Sicily during the Middle Ages.
[35] Commenting on the final chapter on modern textual criticism, he praised Reynolds and Wilson for avoiding the common pitfall of forcing the discipline into a rigid methodological system.
In an obituary for The Independent, the Latinist Michael Reeve wrote that Reynolds's scholarship had the ability "to cut through dozens of manuscripts to the serviceable core".
