Until the modern period, the reproduction of written texts required manual transcription from earlier versions. This cumbersome process inevitably created errors and made it increasingly difficult to identify the original readings among multiple copies. Lachmann's method—associated with German classicist Karl Lachmann (1793-1851)—aimed to provide scholars with a scientific, systematic procedure to standardize the transmission of ancient texts. Although these guidelines for analysis were frequently challenged, they retained a paradigmatic value in philology for many years. In 1963, Italian philologist Sebastiano Timpanaro became the first to analyze in depth the history and limits of Lachmann's widely established theory with his publication, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann.

This important work, which brought Timpanaro international repute, now appears in its first English translation. The Genesis of Lachmann's Method examines the origin, development, and validity of Lachmann's model as well as its association with Lachmann himself. It remains a fundamental work on the history and methods of philology, and Glenn W. Most's translation makes this seminal study available to an English-speaking audience. Revealing Timpanaro's extraordinary talent as a textual critic and world-class scholar, this book will be indispensable to classicists, textual critics, biblical scholars, historians of science, and literary theorists.

Sebastiano Timpanaro (1923-2000) was an Italian classical scholar and historian. He was a member of the British Academy and the Accademia dei Lincei and the author of On Materialism and The Freudian Slip. Glenn W. Most is professor of ancient Greek at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and teaches at the University of Chicago in the Committee on Social Thought and in the departments of classics and comparative literature.

— London Review of Books

— Michael Reeve

— James E. G. Zetzel

— G.W. Bowersock, New Republic

— E.J. KENNEY

— Matthew Leigh, Times Literary Supplement

— Carlo Caruso, MLR