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 medieval manuscripts, from which the plurality of classical texts is derived.

For the politicians, see Roger Mynors (MP).

R. A. B. Mynors
Born(1903-07-28)28 July 1903
Died17 October 1989(1989-10-17) (aged 86)
CitizenshipBritish
Academic background
EducationEton College
Alma materBalliol College, Oxford
Influences
Academic work
DisciplineClassics
InstitutionsOxford University
Cambridge University
Influenced

Mynors' academic career spanned most of the 20th century and straddled both of Britain's ancient universities. After his education and beginnings at Balliol College he served as the Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge (1944–1953) and later as the Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at Oxford (1953–1970). Among his best-known publications are critical editions of Vergil, Catullus, and Pliny the Younger. At the time of his death in 1989, Mynors was considered one of Britain's foremost classicists.[1]

Early life

Mynors was born into a family of English gentry in the South West.[2] The Mynors family had owned the estate of Treago Castle since the 16th century and Mynors would reside there in his later life. His father, Aubrey Baskerville Mynors, was an Anglican clergyman and rector of Langley Burrell in Wiltshire; in 1908, he had been secretary to the Pan-Anglican Congress. His mother was Margery Musgrave, sister of Ernest Musgrave Harvey, Chief Cashier of the Bank of England from 1918 to 1936. 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]

In 1916, after being educated at Summer Fields School in Oxford, Mynors was accepted at Eton College as a scholar. At Eton, he was part of a generation of pupils that included Steven Runciman and George Orwell. His precocious interest in Latin Literature and its transmission was fostered by the encouragement of Cyril Alington and M. R. James. Especially the latter introduced Mynors to the manuscript traditions of medieval Europe, resulting in a life-long friendship.[6]

Career

Balliol

In 1922, Mynors won an exhibition to study Classics at Balliol College, Oxford. Sharing the college with the likes of Cyril Connolly, Jack Westrup, Walter Fraser Oakeshott, and Richard Pares, he experienced a highly successful time as an undergraduate. Graduating with a BA 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. It was only in 1935 that Mynors was elevated to a University Lecturership. Already at this early time, Vergil was at the forefront of his teaching.[8]

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,[9] 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, was compiled in the 1930s. Mynors' interest in medieval codicolgy gave rise to a close co-operation with 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 after seeking refuge from the Third Reich. Fraenkel was a preeminent exponent of the highly professionalised scholarly tradition of Germany. As such, he exerted a strong influence in transforming Mynors from a gentleman-scholar (which most British classicists were at the time) into a professional critic of Latin texts. The two men remained close friends, as evidenced by the affectionate name ('Uncle Ed') used in Mynors' correspondence.[11] Mynors thus became uniquely 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. Soon after his return to Balliol, British involvement in the Second World War led to his being employed at the Exchange Control Department of the Treasury.[13] Mynors' employment at Balliol lasted from 1926 until 1944, a time during which he taught many future scholars, including the great Wittgenstein expert David Pears.[14]

Cambridge

Encouraged by Eduard Fraenkel, Mynors took up an offer to fill the vacant Kennedy Professorship of Latin at the University of Cambridge in 1944.[15] He also became a fellow of Pembroke College. Though the move to Cambridge meant a significant advance of his academic career, he soon came to contemplate a return to Oxford. A first attempt was made in 1949, when he ran, without success, to become master of Balliol College. David Keir was elected in his stead.[16]

In 1945, shortly after moving to Cambridge, he married Lavinia Alington, daughter of his former teacher and Eton headmaster Cyril Alington. They did not have any children.[17] The marriage brought with it two notable siblings-in-law: Elizabeth Alington, the wife of Conservative Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, and Giles Alington, a fellow of University College Oxford. Lavinia was also, through her mother, a granddaughter of George Lyttelton, a prominent figure in the colonisation of New Zealand.[18]

His new post at Cambridge caused significant changes to Mynors' profile as an academic. His previous 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 extensive duties of his university post left little time to get involved in the activities of the college. These circumstances led Mynors to regret his departure from Oxford, going so far as to describe the decision as a 'fundamental error'.[19]

Although his new 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, 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.[20]

Corpus Christi

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.[21] His second stint at Oxford proved to be the backdrop for his most significant work as an editor of classical texts. 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 seventeen 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.[22]

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.[23] 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.[24] As he left the building he was heard to say that he had had a good day.[25] He was survived by his wife Lavinia[26] and buried at St Weonards.[27]

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.[28]

Legacy

During his lengthy 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 magisterial catalogues of the Balliol and Durham Cathedral libraries.[29]

Mynors is also considered an accomplished editor of Latin texts, an activity much aided by his mastery of palaeography. His Oxford editions of the widely-read poets Catullus and Vergil in particular have proved important contributions to the field:[30] they still serve as the standard editions of their texts in the early 21st century.[31] 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 L. D. Reynolds. Because of his reluctance to emend beyond the transmitted readings, he has been described as a conservative textual critic.[32] This approach is thought to have originated in Mynors' tendency to ascribe great historical value to manuscripts and their scribes.[33]

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.[34] In spite of its accomplishments, critics have also noted that the commentary fails to engage seriously with contemporary scholarship on the text, such as the tension between optimistic and pessimistic readings.[35] In this regard, Mynors' last work reflects his lifelong scepticism towards literary criticism of any persuasion.[36]

Honours

Mynors' contributions to his discipline were honoured on a number of occasions. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1944 and was knighted in 1963. He was granted honorary fellowships by all his former colleges at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge: Balliol (1963), Pembroke (1965), and Corpus Christi (1970). The Warburg Institute recognised him in the same way.[37]

Mynors was also an honorary member of several international academic bodies: 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.[38]

Selected publications
  • Durham Cathedral Manuscripts to the end of the twelfth century, Durham Cathedral, 1939.
  • C. Valerii Catulli Carmina, Oxford, 1958.
  • Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Balliol College Oxford, Oxford, 1963.
  • C. Plinii Caecilii Secundi Epistularum Libri Decem, Oxford, 1963.
  • P. Vergili Maronis Opera, Oxford, 1969.
  • Virgil, Georgics, Oxford, 1990.

See also

References
  1. "Sir Roger Mynors, Distinguished Latinist". The Guardian. 19 October 1989.
  2. Gotoff (1991) 309.
  3. Winterbottom (1993) 371.
  4. Ibid. 393.
  5. "Sir Humphrey Mynors, Obituary". The Times. 26 May 1989.
  6. Ibid. 373-4.
  7. Nisbet (2004)
  8. Winterbottom (1993) 375.
  9. "Sir Roger Mynors, Distinguished Latinist". The Guardian. 19 October 1989.
  10. Ibid. 377-80.
  11. Gotoff (1991) 310.
  12. Ibid. 311.
  13. Nisbet (2004).
  14. "DAVID PEARS" (PDF). British Academy. Retrieved 25 July 2020.
  15. Gotoff (1991) 310.
  16. Nisbet (2004).
  17. "Sir Roger Mynors, Obituary". The Times. 19 October 1989.
  18. Winterbottom (1993) 382.
  19. Ibid. 383.
  20. Ibid. 384-8.
  21. "Sir Roger Mynors, Obituary". The Times. 19 October 1989.
  22. Gotoff (1991) 311.
  23. Winterbottom (1993) 393-6.
  24. Nisbet (2004).
  25. Ibid.
  26. "Sir Roger Mynors, Obituary". The Times. 19 October 1989.
  27. Nisbet (2004).
  28. Winterbottom (1991) 395-6.
  29. "Sir Roger Mynors, Obituary". The Times. 19 October 1989.
  30. Maguiness (1971) 200.
  31. Trappes-Lomax (2007) 2.
  32. "Sir Roger Mynors, Obituary". The Times. 19 October 1989.
  33. Nisbet (2004).
  34. Williams (1992) 89.
  35. Johnston (1991).
  36. Winterbottom (1993) 396.
  37. Ibid.
  38. "Roger Mynors". New York Times. 21 October 1989.

Works cited


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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