To describe a book as “long-awaited” is a reviewer's cliché. In the case of this book, however, it is a gross understatement. Materials for the new edition of Malalas were initially assembled by K. Weierholt. In the mid–1970s, after Weierholt's death, the project was taken over by Hans Thurn. By the time of Thurn's own death in 1993 the edition was almost ready, but still a further seven years, and the assistance of several other scholars, were required before Ioannis Malalae Chronographia final…
Read moreTo describe a book as “long-awaited” is a reviewer's cliché. In the case of this book, however, it is a gross understatement. Materials for the new edition of Malalas were initially assembled by K. Weierholt. In the mid–1970s, after Weierholt's death, the project was taken over by Hans Thurn. By the time of Thurn's own death in 1993 the edition was almost ready, but still a further seven years, and the assistance of several other scholars, were required before Ioannis Malalae Chronographia finally appeared. In the interim we had the curious phenomenon of the “Australian Malalas” — an English translation and apparatus based on a far fuller set of testimonia than the edition on which it was principally based (Dindorf's Bonn edition of 1831, shorn of that edition's misreadings of the main witness, MS Baroccianus Graecus 182 in the Bodleian Library).