L. D. Reynolds

Leighton Durham Reynolds FBA ((1930-02-11)11 February 1930 – (1999-12-04)4 December 1999) was a British Latinist who was known for his work on textual criticism. Spending his entire teaching career at Brasenose College, Oxford, he prepared the most commonly cited edition of Seneca the Younger's Letters.^[1]

The central academic achievement of Reynolds's career was his monograph The Medieval Tradition of Seneca's Letters (1965), in which he reconstructed how the text was transmitted through the Middle Ages^[a] and revealed that most of the younger manuscripts were of little use for the establishment of the text. 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.

Writing about the set of critical editions authored by Reynolds, the Latinist Michael Reeve stated that Reynolds's scholarship had the ability "to cut through dozens of manuscripts to the serviceable core".^[3] At the time of its publication, his work on Seneca was considered by some commentators to be difficult to surpass.

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