Wikipedia:Today's featured article/November 15, 2021

Leighton Durham Reynolds (1930–1999) was a British Latinist who is best known for his work on textual criticism. He spent his teaching career at Brasenose College, Oxford (pictured), where he published the most commonly cited edition of Seneca the Younger's Letters. The central academic achievement of his 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. He also wrote 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 Wilson co-authored 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 "cut through dozens of manuscripts to the serviceable core". When published, his work on Seneca was considered by some commentators to be difficult to surpass.