User:Modussiccandi/SLA

An edition of the poems of Catullus was Mynors' first entry in the Oxford Classical Texts series. His text came on the heels of two recent editions by Moritz Schuster (1949) and Ignazio Cazzaniga (1956) with which it had to compete. Taking a conservative stance on the considerable problems posed by the text of Catullus, Mynors did not print any modern emendations unless they corrected obvious scribal errors. Contrary to his conservative instincts, he rejected the traditional archaising orthography of the manuscripts in favour of normalised Latin spelling. This intervention was described by philologist Revilo Oliver as "the victory of common sense" in Catullan criticism. For reviewer Philip Levine, Mynors edition sets itself apart from previous texts by its scrutiny of a "large bulk" of unexamined manuscripts.

His edition of the Epistulae employed a similar method but aimed to be an intermediate step rather than an overhaul of Pliny's text. Mynors' edition of the complete works of Vergil revamped the text constructed by F. A. Hirtzel in 1900 which had become outdated. He enlarged the manuscript base by drawing on 13 minor manuscripts from the ninth century and added an index of personal names.

Mynors established a new text of Bede's Ecclesiastical History for the edition he published together with the historian Bertram Colgrave. His was the first critical edition of this text since that of Charles Plummer (1896). Collation of the Saint Petersburg Bede, an 8th-century manuscript unknown to Plummer, allowed Mynors to construct a new version of the M tradition. Although he did not append a critical apparatus and detailed exegetical notes, his analysis of the work's textual history was praised by Church historian Gerald Bonner as "lucid" and "excellently done".