Queens' College : Artes rhetoricae

Queens' College

<p style='text-align: justify;'>This manuscript on paper is one of the two manuscripts in Greek of Queens' College, Cambridge. It contains a late 15th- or early 16th-century collection of the <i><i>Artes rhetoricae</i></i> and rhetorical treatises by or attributed to Demetrius Phalereus (c. 350-283 BCE), Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 - after 7 BCE), Alexander of Ephesus, son of Numenius, called Lychnos (2nd cent. CE), Menander Rhetor of Laodicea (3rd cent. CE), Apsines of Gadara (3rd cent. CE), Pseudo-Aelius Aristides, and Phoebammon (5th-6th cent. CE ?). The copying of Menander's second treatise ends incompletely where another manuscript, <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55005722s'>Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, grec 1741</a>, also ends, and it has been proposed that the entire manuscript is actually a copy of the Paris manuscript. The texts are in <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://hdl.handle.net/2027/ucm.5316539973'>the collection <i>Rhetores Graeci</i></a> printed in Venice by Aldus Manutius in 1508.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>The first part of the codex is written by Nikolaos (RGK I 330), a scribe who also copied <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-NN-00001-00024/18'>Cambridge, University Library, MS Nn.1.24</a> and <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-GONVILLE-AND-CAIUS-00076-00043/77'>Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 76/43</a> (ff. 35r-66v). The second part, by another copyist, continues and completes the first part.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>It was bequeathed to Queens' College by Thomas Church who was the tutor of the previous owner, Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon (1535-1595).</p>