Barbour, Ruth. Greek
Literary Hands: A.D. 400-1600.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.
Part
I
This rather
interesting book is divided into three main sections. The first section is a very long introduction
that explains the history of the Byzantine text. The second part is a bibliography that turned
out to be mostly in German. The third
part is a list of scanned portions of Byzantine manuscripts and their
descriptions. The most relevant portion
of this book for our class is the introduction to the book, though this is a
poor name as the introduction is about a third of the book. Barbour goes through the various periods of
script development from uncial and miniscule up to the varying hands of the
provincials and Renaissance.
Before she
delves into the different periods of medieval Greek script, Barbour mentions two big problems in mapping
the development of Byzantine Script. The first of these is that most of the
thousand plus dateable manuscripts fall between into two categories: religious texts
from about 950 to 1200 and a mixture of texts between 1300 and 1600. There is an understandable lack of texts
between 1204, when the Fourth Crusade conquered Constantinople, and 1261, when
the Empire of Nicaea reconquered Constantinople. There are very few dateable texts from the
other periods of Byzantine history. The second problem is that there are no
distinct differences between scripts based on time and place of writing. Barbour explains this by saying that because
Byzantium did not break apart as the Western Empire did, they were able to
maintain a more unified and traditional way of writing. She also mentions that as the Byzantine
Empire lost territories to enemies such as the Arabs, Bulgars (excepting when
Basil II slew a few), and Normans they developed the idea that they had to
protect their time honored-traditions.
This last problem explains why it is difficult to date manuscripts that
are neither signed nor state where they were copied or created.
The first major script of the Byzantine
era (most scholars agree this started in the early fifth century, but others
argue various other dates) was the uncial
script. Uncial just means a script
that is written in all capital letters.
This was probably adopted from the Latin uncial script used by the
Romans because the Hellenistic and Classical Greeks wrote in a miniscule script
(in fact, early forms of the Greek New Testament were written in miniscule
Koine). Byzantines used the uncial
script between roughly 400 and 1200 A.D.
This period is divided into two halves.
The first half saw all literature being written in uncial script, while
the second half (800 onwards) saw uncial written in official documents and in
liturgical texts (which would be read in dim light, so they needed to be clear
and large).
The second script to emerge was the miniscule script. This script contained lower-case letters;
capital letters were still used for proper nouns and the beginnings of
paragraphs and pages only. Miniscule
lasted from about 800 all the way into the seventeenth century. The miniscule script saw very little change
until about the thirteenth century.
Without a signature, date, or stated place of manufacture it is nearly
impossible to date or place the manuscript.
Sometimes historians are able to tell whether a manuscript was written
in the provinces of Greece or Anatolia as opposed to in Constantinople by the
quality of the items used in the manuscript’s production. In order for this observation to be possible
a lot of different factors have to fall into place. Constantinople was much wealthier than any
other city or province in Byzantium, so provincial manuscripts were often made
of poorer quality and written with instruments influenced by either Europe or
Syria. Even these details do not
guarantee that a script can be dated or placed.
The third
period of script development in Byzantium was during the late Byzantine period
(1261-1453). During the second half of
the thirteenth century a script in which letters lost their proportionate size
developed. Some letters, often the first
and last letters of each word, would be written with crazy stylistic whooshes
and swirls along with being much larger than the other letters. Middle letters of words would sometimes be
reduced to unreadable sizes. This was
possibly a reactionary element to the chaotic times of the Latin invasions of
Greece and the steady decline of Byzantium.
By the end of the thirteenth century the craziness died down and the
miniscule returned to a similar style as the pre-Latin invasion of 1204.
The final
period of the Byzantine script was during the Fall of Byzantium and the
Renaissance (1400-1600). This period saw
many Byzantine scholars fleeing the advance of the Ottomans. They mostly fled to Italy, but some went as
far afield as England. These scholars
began teaching Greek to Italian students and copying Greek manuscripts for
Italian use. This helped spark the
Italian Renaissance. Because the
scholars were teaching Greek to western Europeans they had to keep the script
neat and simple. Out of this migration
of scholars developed a script that was clear and almost cartoonish in its
simplicity when compared to former Greek scripts. This script was eventually used to print
Greek well into the nineteenth century.
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