Greek Manuscript Tradition Part 1

Diller, Aubrey.  Studies in Greek Manuscript Tradition.  Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1983.

Part 1

This book is a collection of fifty-three essays written on different aspect of Byzantine Greek manuscripts.  Many of the essays are about the origins and travels of a particular manuscript, but many deal with the writing styles and script styles of the Greek authors.  As my previous posts have mentioned, dating a manuscript that does not include a date or a signature of a known scribe is very difficult due to each style coexisting with each other.  Because this book is divided into numerous essays, I will choose multiple essays to read for each week.

A) “A Companion of the Uspenski Gospels.”

This article deals with a codex called the Uspenski Gospels.  This codex included a colophon, a mark or short description by the author usually giving a date and name for the author, that dated the codex to AD 835.  This was the second Greek codex to have been dated (this article was written in 1956), and is one of the earliest manuscripts containing miniscule letters.  The author first goes into the travel log of the manuscript.  It was written in Palestine and ended up in Russia in the eighteen hundreds.  After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, many Byzantines fled to Orthodox Russia seeking asylum, and they took their manuscripts with them.  The codex includes the seven Catholic Epistles and the fourteen Pauline Epistles.  The text is in two columns.  The first column is written in majuscule (Uncial).  This is the main text.  The second column is a commentary on the epistles.  The commentary is mainly written in miniscule, but there are some majuscule forms of letters throughout the commentary.  This document presents a problem to scholars because while it is one of the first surviving examples of miniscule writing, the miniscule is so well developed that there must have been many precursors.  This makes it very difficult to put a date on when miniscule began being used.

B) “Incipient Errors in Manuscripts.”

This rather fun and interesting article explains some of the different errors found in manuscripts.  The author points out that the two most common types of errors are omission of whole lines and the repetition of lines.  These are most prevalent in manuscripts copied during the Renaissance in Italy.  This is probably because the scribes were so focused on copying down each line that they did not realize they had skipped or repeated a line.  This seems to suggest that Italian students were copying these manuscripts under a either a Greek tutor or an Italian tutor who knew Greek.  These grammatical units that are omitted or repeated are called homoeoteleuton.  When these scribes, or their supervisors, realized the mistake they would either erase the error and continue writing the correct version, or, if the error was found in the middle of a paragraph, the author would scratch out the mistake and put the correct version in the margins as a note.  The author suggests that these errors could be a useful tool in determining whether a manuscript is a derivative or not.  A derivative manuscript is simply a manuscript that is a copy of another, older manuscript.