Medieval and Early Modern Greek Manuscripts : Psalms

Medieval and Early Modern Greek Manuscripts

<p style='text-align: justify;'>This manuscript consists of a series of fragments from a Psalter, probably produced in England, no later than the the 12th century and probably no earlier. The Greek script, written painstakingly in broad strokes, is of a highly unusual type which does not belong to any Greek scribal tradition. It appears to be an imitation of mixed minuscule script by a copyist unfamiliar with scribal practice in the language, suggesting that it was produced outside of the Greek-speaking world. The style of parchment is suggestive of a western European origin, and this is corroborated by the presence of very early Latin annotations, probably of the 12th century, and Latin quire signatures which are probably of a similar date.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>The scribe's slow and cumbersome formation of the Greek letters in an apparently unique fashion would sit naturally with a western production of this period, a time when there was no living tradition of Greek writing in the Latin world outside of southern Italy. A likely English origin has been assigned to the early Latin glosses and annotations, and more confidently to later Latin annotations dated to the 15th century. M. R. James conjectured that the latter may be the work of the Franciscan scholar Richard Brinkley, a scholar of Greek and Hebrew who is known to have owned another Greek Psalter, and wrote similar annotations in a Hebrew Psalter (James, 'Greek Psalter', p. 172).</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Dr Christopher Wright</p>