Description

Stirring the Dry Bones is decidedly not a work of scholarship as scholarship is done today. It is unreliable and not exhaustive (although perhaps more reliable and more exhaustive than some of what passes for scholarship today) in its reference; it is rambling and perhaps unfocused; it is decidedly, in the words of an anonymous peer reviewer I once encountered in a different context, "shockingly untheorized". Stirring the Dry Bones is a product of what the same anonymous reviewer named "an old-style philologist". This fact will perhaps become obvious with a glance at the notes and the bibliography, which are both filled with a grand company of very old old-style philologists. Not much space is held for more modern scholarship, partly out of a lack of interest in the modern theoretical fads of the field, and partly out of the sheer laziness of advancing age: I have a very nice garden (alongside a personal library Cicero would have envied) and "Je sais aussi. . . qu'il faut cultiver notre jardin."