Lectiones Scrupulosae

Book excerpt: This sixth AN Supplementum, Lectiones Scrupulosae ('Scrupulous Rea¡dings'), is a Festschrift in honour of Maaike Zimmerman offered to her by a group of Apuleian scholars on the occasion of her sixty-fifth birthday. It is a volume focused on the text of Apuleius' Metamorphoses that offers Maaike and all other lectores scrupulosi ('scrupulous readers') of Apuleius' novel a collection of studies that shed new light on certain aspects of text and interpretation. Moreover, since Maaike Zimmerman is currently working on a new critical edition of Apuleius' Metamorphoses for the Oxford Classical Texts series, an additional motivation for this volume was the presentation of a collection of original papers providing material on a number of passages for Maaike to ponder and take into consideration as she reviews the text.Everything proceeds from the text: a textual issue can open the door to a broader approach, including, for example, discussions of literary interpretation, linguistics, or style. Hence, one of the themes of the volume is to show connections between problems of textual criticism and larger interpretative issues (e.g. Bitel, Finkelpearl, McCreight, Keulen). Maaike herself is expert at this kind of 'explication du texte'. Within the broad spectrum between 'text' and 'interpretation', the contributions to this volume present different approaches and choices, varying from a traditional, purely 'textual' approach to one that is largely interpretative and seeks to explain the multi-layered texture of Apuleius' narrative in the light of certain metaphors, images, or expressions. Some articles offer new conjectures and readings of vexed passages (Harrison, Plaza), support unjustly neglected conjectures (McCreight, Schmeling and Montiglio), or propose to banish certain passages or phrases once and for all from the center of the text to a peripheral exile in the apparatus criticus, as a footnote in the history of the text's reception (Bitel, Hunink). Other contributions focus on the 'authorship' of the Metamorphoses (Tatum) or the vicissitudes of the Apuleian text in the hands of Medieval and Renaissance readers (Hunink, May). Through their contributions to Lectiones Scrupulosae, the authors of this AN Supplementum not only honour Maaike as a text-editor or commentator, but also pay tribute to her other scholarly output, such as her work on Cupid and Psyche (Hij¡mans), on Apuleius and Roman Satire or the Greek Ass Tale (e.g. Dowden, Graverini, Plaza, Panayotakis), on the reader's role in the Prologue and on Apuleian ecphrasis (Keulen, van Mal-Maeder), or on space symbolism in the Metamorphoses (James and O'Brien). But all contributors in this volume also send Maaike the same message of friendship and gratitude that can be summarized as follows: Lector, intende: laetaberis.