Professor Catherine Conybeare Contributes to Translation of A.E. Housman Lecture
A new translation of the lecture "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism" by renowned scholar and poet A.E. Housman has an interesting Bryn Mawr connection.
Translated by Luigi Battezzato, professor of Greek at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, the translation is supplemented with a preface, afterword, and previously unpublished extracts from the working notebook in which Housman wrote notes and preparatory citations.
The source notebook is known as "Notebook X," and is housed in Bryn Mawr's Special Collections Department. The passages that are used by Battezzato were transcribed by Catherine Conybeare, the Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Greek, Latin and Classical Studies. Battezzato and Conybeare met and began their collaboration while they were both Visiting Fellows at the University of Oxford's All Souls College in 2019-20.
Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections Department holds one of the most important collections of A.E. Housman papers and books, the result of a gift by Philadelphia collector Seymour Adelman (1906-1985). In addition to Notebooks X & Y, the collection includes Housman’s correspondence with his brother, prominent writer, illustrator, and theatrical producer Laurence Housman; many letter exchanges with publishers, writers, and classicists; copies of nearly all of Housman’s published works; and a large part of Housman’s personal library. Highlights from the collection were shown at Bryn Mawr and at the Morgan Library in New York in 1986 in the exhibition The Name and Nature of A.E. Housman.