Medieval and Early Modern Greek Manuscripts : Greek grammatical, rhetorical and philosophical texts

Medieval and Early Modern Greek Manuscripts

<p style='text-align: justify;'>This manuscript is a composite made up of small parts copied at a variety of dates from the 13th to the 16th centuries. It contains a variety of <i>Greek grammatical, rhetorical and philosophical texts</i>. The oldest part, copied in the late 13th or early 14th century, contains three orations by the 4th-century rhetorician Libanios. The date and the use of eastern paper indicate that it was produced in the Greek-speaking world. Another portion, from the mid-15th century, contains another oration of Libanios and a short lexical text. A third part contains a fragment of a text by Andromachos of Crete, physician to the Emperor Nero (37-68 CE). This was copied by the Italian scribe Bartolomeo Zanetti, a native of Brescia who worked in Venice, Florence and Rome, in the first half of the 16th century. The longest part, also from the 16th century and probably also produced in Italy, contains a series of brief texts and excerpts, some anonymous, others from the works of the 1st century BCE historian and teacher of rhetoric Dionysios of Halikarnassos and the 4th century CE philosopher Maximos Byzantios.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>The manuscript, or at least the older parts of it, was owned by the Venetian humanist Cardinal Domenico Grimani (1460-1523). It later came into the hands of the scholar Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), and then those of Thomas Gale (c. 1635-1702), whose son Roger Gale (1672-1744) donated it to Trinity College along with the rest of his collection.</p>A previous binding for the manuscript reused a fragment of a 16th-century French document as a wrapper.<p style='text-align: justify;'>Dr Christopher Wright</p>