page_title: R. A. B. Mynors
section_title: Balliol College, Oxford
hierarchical_section_title: R. A. B. Mynors / Academic career / Balliol College, Oxford
caption_attribution_description: English: 'Treago', St Weonards, Herefordshire A closer view of this fortified manor house showing one of its rounded towers on the left of the building
context_page_description: Sir Roger Aubrey Baskerville Mynors FBA, often cited as R. A. B. Mynors, was an English classicist, textual critic, and medievalist who held the senior chair of Latin at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He is most renowned for his contribution to the study of manuscripts, from which most classical texts are reconstructed.
  Mynors' academic career spanned most of the 20th century and straddled both of England's two oldest universities. Having been educated at Eton College, he read Classics at Balliol College, Oxford and spent the early stages of his academic career as a fellow of the college. He later served as the Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge from 1944 to 1953 and as the Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at Oxford from 1953 to 1970. He died in a car accident on the way to his country residence in 1989.
  At the time of his death in 1989, Mynors had earned a reputation as one of Britain's foremost classicists. An expert on palaeography, he has been credited with unravelling a number of highly complex manuscript relationships in his catalogues of the Balliol and Durham Cathedral libraries.
context_section_description: In 1922, Mynors won an exhibition to study classics at Balliol College, Oxford. Sharing the college with the literary critic Cyril Connolly, musicologist Jack Westrup, the future Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Walter Fraser Oakeshott, and the historian Richard Pares, he experienced a highly successful time as an undergraduate. Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts  in 1926, he won the Hertford, Craven, and Derby scholarships. He then was elected to a fellowship at the same college and became a tutor in Classics. In 1935 he was elevated to a University Lecturership. At the time of his university appointment, much of Mynors' teaching was dedicated to the poet Vergil, whose complete works he would edit over the course of the following decades.
  His tenure at Oxford University saw the beginning of his comprehensive work on medieval manuscripts. From the late 1920s onwards, Mynors was drawn more to matters of codicology than to purely classical questions. He prepared an edition of the 6th century scholar Cassiodorus, for which he travelled extensively to continental Europe; a critical edition was published in 1937. In 1929, he was appointed librarian of Balliol College. This position gave impetus to create a catalogue of the college's medieval manuscripts. A similar project, a catalogue of the manuscripts housed at Durham Cathedral, was compiled in the 1930s. Mynors' interest in codicology gave rise to a close co-operation with the medievalists Richard William Hunt and Neil Ripley Ker.
  In 1936, near the end of his tenure at Balliol, Mynors made the acquaintance of Eduard Fraenkel, who had been elected to a chair of Latin at Oxford. Having relocated to England because of the increasing discrimination of German Jews, Fraenkel was a preeminent exponent of Germany's scholarly tradition. His influence contributed to Mynors' transformation from a gentleman-scholar to a professional critic of Latin texts. Since the two men maintained a close friendship, Mynors became well placed to exhibit the virtues of both the British and the German tradition in his academic work.
  Mynors spent the winter of 1938 as a visiting scholar at Harvard University. In 1940, after a brief return to Balliol, British involvement in the Second World War led to his being employed at the Exchange Control Department of the Treasury. At Balliol, Mynors taught from 1926 until 1944, a time during which he taught many future scholars, including the Wittgenstein expert David Pears.
caption: Treago Castle, the Mynors family's country residence
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