Edward Courtney () was a Northern Irish classicist. After reading Classics at Trinity College Dublin, he taught Latin literature at

King's College London King's College London (informally King's or KCL) is a public research university located in London, England. King's was established by royal charter in 1829 under the patronage of King George IV and the Duke of Wellington. In 1836, King's ...

until 1983. He then worked in the United States and held the Basil L. Gildersleeve Professorship at the University of Virginia when he retired. He specialised in textual criticism, publishing critical editions of Valerius Flaccus, Juvenal, Statius, and

Petronius Gaius Petronius Arbiter"Gaius Petronius Arbiter"
Royal Belfast Academical Institution, where, encouraged by his teachers H. C. Fay and John Cowser, he began to develop an interest in Latin literature. In 1950, he began studying

Classics Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world, classics traditionally refers to the study of Classical Greek and Roman literature and their related original languages, Ancient Greek and Latin. Classics ...

as a scholar at Trinity College Dublin. He graduated in 1954 and was awarded the Gold Medal in Classics for his results. In 1954, Courtney was hired as a research lecturer at Christ Church, a constituent college of the University of Oxford. Two senior colleagues exerted particular influence on him: the

Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus (; 8 December 65 – 27 November 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace (), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his ' ...

scholar

Robin Nisbet Robert George Murdoch Nisbet, FBA (21 May 1925 – 14 May 2013), known as Robin Nisbet, was a British classicist and academic, specializing in Latin literature. From 1970 to 1992, he was Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at the University of O ...

and

Eduard Fraenkel Eduard David Mortier Fraenkel FBA () was a German classical scholar who served as the Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at the University of Oxford from 1935 until 1953. Born to a family of assimilated Jews in the German Empire, he studied Clas ...

, the former Corpus Christi Professor of Latin. In 1959, he left Oxford to become a lecturer at

. Having worked there for more than 20 years, he took up to the Ely Professorship of Classics at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1983. From 1993 until his retirement he was the inaugural Basil L. Gildersleeve Professor at the University of Virginia. He died on 24 November 2019 in

Charlottesville, Virginia Charlottesville, colloquially known as C'ville, is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It is the county seat of Albemarle County, which surrounds the city, though the two are separate legal entities. It is named after Queen Ch ...

Work

Courtney specialised in the textual criticism of Latin poetry. He published critical editions of Valerius Flaccus, Juvenal, Statius,

Petronius Gaius Petronius Arbiter"Gaius Petronius Arbiter"
Michael Reeve Michael David Reeve FBA (11 January 1943) is a British classicist and Professor Emeritus at Cambridge University. One of the foremost textual scholars of his generation, he has published widely on the transmission of Latin and Greek texts. H ...

wrote that he knew of no other contemporary scholar "who could have tackled with such erudition an independence of judgement" the topic of fragmentary poetry.

Recognition

In 2002, a group of classicists who were influenced by Courtney published a '' Festschrift'' in his honour entitled (''Vertis in usum: Studies in Honour of Edwards Courtney''). It included papers by Michael Winterbottom, Dirk Obbink,

Cynthia Damon Cynthia Ellen Murray Damon (born 1957) is a Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and has written extensively on Latin literature and Roman historiography, having published translations and commentaries on authors such a ...

, and

Susan Treggiari Susan Treggiari is an English scholar of Ancient Rome,John Simon Guggenheim Memoria ...

among others.

References

Bibliography

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Courtney, Edward 1932 births 2019 deaths Alumni of Trinity College Dublin Scholars and academics from Belfast Classical scholars from Northern Ireland British Latinists Academics of King's College London University of Virginia faculty Contributors to the Oxford Classical Dictionary Stanford University Department of Classics faculty