Readers and scholars of contemporary literature in English and other languages generally do not have to worry very much about their source texts: what is published in book form is essentially what the author wrote, perhaps with a few uncorrected typographical errors. Readers and scholars of Latin and Greek literature are not in such a fortunate position. The texts presented in 'critical editions', such as the Oxford Classical Texts or the Teubner or Budé series, though the outcome of painstaking scholarship carried out over centuries, are by no means as certain as those of most modern literature. Ancient texts were copied and recopied by hand over the course of more than a millennium, and in the process both accidental and deliberate alterations accumulated, often leaving the text in a grievously 'corrupted' condition. The original, 'autograph' texts are long lost, and often our earliest copies are more than a thousand years removed from them. Textual criticism is the discipline that examines whatever 'witnesses' to an ancient text are available and tries to identify mistakes in its transmission and so far as possible establish its original form. Most of what we know about the ancient world comes from written sources, and textual criticism is therefore fundamental to the study of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.

The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Latin Textual Criticism is unprecedented in its scope and detail. It covers textual transmission in antiquity and the middle ages, the history of the subject and its most important practitioners, and methodological and practical aspects of textual criticism and editorial technique. It includes four case studies and, unlike most other treatments of the subject, deals also with textual criticism of inscriptions and papyri.