A History of Classical Scholarship

Sir John Edwin Sandys (18441922) was a leading Cambridge classicist and a Fellow of St. John's College. His most famous work is this three-volume History of Classical Scholarship, published between 1903 and 1908, which remains the only large-scale work on the subject to span the entire period from the sixth century BCE to the end of the nineteenth century. The history of classical studies was a popular topic during the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany, but Sandys stands out for the ambitious scope of his work, even though much of it was based on earlier scholarship. His chronological account is subdivided by genre and region, with some chapters devoted to particularly influential individuals. Volume 1 covers the Classical period, Byzantine scholarship, and the medieval West to 1350, Volume 2 the period from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, and Volume 3 the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.