Medieval and Early Modern Greek Manuscripts : Miscellany

Medieval and Early Modern Greek Manuscripts

<p style='text-align: justify;'>This manuscript is a composite <i>Miscellany</i>, made up of multiple parts copied separately in the second half of the 17th century. Much of the content is supplementary material relating to the study of a range of Greek texts. These include collected scholia to works of the rhetor and satirist Lucian of Samosata and the philosopher Porphyry, variant lections found in manuscripts of Porphyry, the poet and physician Nicander of Colophon and the agricultural manual known as the Geoponica, and indices of words used by Nicander of Colophon and in the encyclopaedic lexicon known as the Souda. There are also excerpts from theological texts, the compilation of Euthymios Zigabenos (c. 1050-c.1118) and a treatise by Photios I, Patriarch of Constantinople (c. 820-c. 891), and two short rhetorical texts, one by the ancient rhetor Tiberius.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>The various components of the manuscript were written by different hands at different times. Two of these are identified by notes, with the dates of their work: one Bruno, who copied the scholia on Lucian from a manuscript belonging to the Dutch scholar Isaac Vossius in 1660, and a scholar with the surname Mencken, who compiled variant readings from a manuscript of Porphyry in Leiden in 1687. The rest can also all be dated to the second half of the 17th century by the watermarks of the papers used.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>The style of script of the various hands ranges from an informal manner appropriate to scholarly note-taking to the elegant script employed for the longest text, the index to the Souda. This was evidently a more formal production, a characteristic reflected also in the careful and ornate drawings of animals, mostly birds, which decorate the foot of many of its pages.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Dr Christopher Wright</p>