Chapter 5 starts with the definitions of the note and the acoustics of sound production. Here, I first examine the acoustical underpinnings of the classical Greek writings on the subject and the impact they had on how the musical note was conceptualized. I then demonstrate that scholars of the medieval Islamic world approached their received wisdom with a skeptical eye and occasionally disagreed with their intellectual masters. These disagreements resulted in illuminating conversations about the nature of a musical note, how it should be differentiated from mere sound, and what role do acoustics of sound production play in these discussions.

Chapter 6 discusses the definitions of ratios and intervals as different ways of conceptualizing the relationship between musical notes. Here, the author’s main interest lies in the two different ways in which the ancient Greek scholars of music, the Pythagoreans and the Aristoxenians, conceptualized the relationship between any given two notes. While the former understood notes as equal to numbers and thus conceptualized the relationship in the form of a numerical ratio, the latter understood them as points on a continuum and thus perceived the relationship as a geometrical distance between the two points on a scale. A third group of Greek scholars, the later Neoplatonic scholars, tried to reconcile the two approaches into a synthesis. It was this synthesis that Islamic scholars inherited during the medieval period.

Chapter 7 will examine the question of consonance and dissonance of musical ratios and intervals in the medieval Islamic world and the growing importance of the human soul in the discussions pertaining to this question. The Pythagoreans, having conceptualized the relationship between two notes as a numerical ratio, insisted that the key to consonance and dissonance lay in the mathematical neatness of these ratios. The Aristoxenians, however, insisted that consonance and dissonance were a matter of human experience. A third group of synthesizers emerged that aimed at reconciling the two approaches: Neoplatonic philosophers. Inheriting the works of these philosophers, scholars of music in the Islamic world set about the task of explaining the mechanisms of apprehension of consonance by human ears according to mathematical rules. In this process, the role of the soul as the link between humanity and the cosmos – with its mathematical underpinnings – gradually grew in emphasis.

This chapter explores the rationales of the paratexts accompanying John Tzetzes’ commentary on Hermogenes in the bespoke copy contained in the Vossianus Gr. Q1. Besides clarifying the circumstances prompting that specific copy of the commentary, these paratexts scaffold Tzetzes’ authorial agency as well as his social role in a cultural economy based on patronage. The chapter also shows how they speak to the way Tzetzes exploits the inherent ambiguities of language and tradition, by looking at them as examples of enacted ἀμφοτερογλωσσία, resting on dialectic.

This chapter explores the intersections between work by literary scholars with that done in synchronic and diachronic Latin linguistics. As an example of the different approaches and different toolkits employed by the linguist and the literary scholar, I discuss the way linguists have explained the phrase Veneres Cupidinesque in Catullus 3.1, contrasted with interpretations given in commentaries on Catullus and in Latin dictionaries. In the linguists’ account, the phrase is an archaism which continues an earlier Indo-European pattern used to refer to pairs, finding its closest parallels in Sanskrit texts. I then compare literary Latin to other registers and dialects, and discuss the difficulties involved in the term ‘Vulgar Latin’. The chapter also examines other areas in which linguistic scholarship might be usefully consulted by readers of Latin literature: word accent, vowel-length and metre; etymology, semantics and the lexicography; grammars and monographs on morphology, syntax and discourse analysis, including in particular recent approaches using sociolinguistics. Passages from Catullus are discussed throughout.

This short chapter explores texts relating to 1–2 Samuel, including commentaries, research works, text editions, and the context of the Former Prophets and Deuteronomistic History. It also surveys methodological issues, historical and archeological studies of the book’s context, and other useful works.

The law of the virtual Roman Empire persisted throughout the Middle Ages, combined with customary law, like Salic law, or Saxon Law. Roman law was rediscovered and studied in the first universities in Western Europa. Legal scholars of the day made comments and thus developed so-called canon law: a mix of roman, medieval and religious law. At the same, as a result of feudal relations, quid pro quo documents, like the magna Charta and Joyous entries, emerged, granting different classes different privileges and rights in turn for assistance, tax and loyalty to a ruler. This marked the beginning of conditional power and the rule of law.

Texts played a central role in the transregional and transtemporal spread and survival of the Shāfiʿī school and Islamic law broadly. Jurists were primarily concerned to engage with texts, studying, teaching, interpreting, abridging, commenting, referencing and cross-referencing, contextualising, systematising and prioritising them. Texts constituted their spheres of influence, and through them they defended and established themselves as authorities on religious law. Properly formulated legal texts and pronouncements of fatwās or judgements on the basis of texts constituted the axis of the fuqahā estate. The whole community of jurists became active with discourses on works written by masters, their disciples, disciples’ disciples and so on. This “textuality” was there in the prototype of micro-networks and its later developments, but the intensification of macro-networks of fuqahā estates made texts more crucial, for they facilitated the circulation of juridical ideas across long distances and periods.

The authoritative texts of the Shāfiʿī school such as the Minhāj began to be circulated, interpreted and advanced across the Indian Ocean rim, where its largest followers had started to take up residence. This transoceanic transmission was mediated by other texts in the interim, mainly by the commentaries of the Minhāj. This chapter analyses the commentarial intermediation between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century with a focus on one commentary, Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj (Tuḥfa) by Ibn al-Ḥajar al-Haytamī, an Egyptian jurist who built up a successful career in Mecca. The trajectories of this commentary reflect many of the contemporary developments in political and cultural realms, such as the decline of the Mamlūks, the rise of the Ottomans and their conquest of the Middle East, and the increased mobility toward Mecca and beyond to the Hijaz. The Tuḥfa addressed its immediate regional contexts, while reasserting the geo-cultural superiority of Mecca and the Hijaz and the racial prominence of the Arabs. Its approach was challenged by Ibn Ḥajar’s colleagues from Cairo through their commentaries. Just as Nawawī once amalgamated two ṭarīqas, now commentators on his Minhāj were divided into two sub-schools.

Throughout the Commentaries, Blackstone repeatedly availed himself of comparative legal history. Comparison allowed him to detect the invariable principles of legal experience and organise his systematic exposition of English law around them. This method proved crucial in Blackstone’s treatment of custom, as it allowed him to present the chief source of English common law by addressing the main questions concerning the nature of custom that had been raised earlier by Western jurisprudence. The paper will explore the depth of Blackstone’s engagement with such traditions. In doing so, it will investigate whether custom was understood differently on the two sides of the Channel.

This paper considers the various approaches one might take to commenting on a text as fragmentary as the Annals. I begin with some general remarks about fragments and look at their specific implications for Ennius. I then focus on some details from the two English language commentaries on the Annals to date, those of Otto Skutsch and his precursor, Ethel Mary Steuart. Comparing sample notes and larger structures in the two commentaries, showing how both commentators were seduced – to varying degrees – by a desire for completeness and copia, and how the poems that emerge from these commentaries differ. Though Steuart was rigorously trained in the same basic stable as Skutsch, her work is too far inferior – in accuracy and in sophistication of methodology – to his and to other available editions of the Annals to stand up against them. But it is also the work of a learned scholar with a different voice and a heterodox vision of the poem, a useful presence in a world where Skutsch’s Ennius may no longer be our Ennius.

This chapter examines the commentary tradition of a one-line fragment of Ennius’ Annals, qui vicit non est victor nisi victum fatetur (513 Skutsch). Although modern commentators have adduced a broad range of comparanda, their selection of historical parallels reflects preconceived notions of what the line must mean. By returning to the line’s original context in a late-antique scholium on the Aeneid, we are better able to appreciate the line as an epic fragment. Parallels drawn from Ennius and other poets allow for a different reading of the fragment, and suggest alternative methodologies for the use of fragments in historical arguments.