Greek Manuscript Tradition Part 2

Studies in Greek Manuscript Tradition part 2

            The first of the essays that I chose for this past week was “Byzantine Lists of Old and New Geographical Names.”  The Byzantines were always looking back to classical Greek and Roman times.  This was no surprise as they were the remnants of the Eastern Roman Empire.  This is also heavily reflected in their writings.  Anna Komnene often refers to foreigners by an archaic classical name such as “Kelt” for Normans, “Scythes” for Petchenegs, and “Alemanni.”  This was a common practice amongst Byzantine historians, especially those writing in Attic Greek. 

This idea of classicizing names also carried over into place names.  Byzantine authors writing in both Attic styles and Koine styles often referred to place names by their ancient names instead of their medieval names.  This often confuses some modern Byzantinists if they are unused to this device.  Luckily for modern historians of the Byzantine Empire, the medieval Greek authors often left lists of classical place names and the medieval Greek equivalents.  These lists are called metonomasy. While these have little to do with the actual script, these lists show that the Byzantine authors were always looking to classical works as a model.  This helps to explain the numerous other literary devices that are found in Byzantine writings.

The second essay, “Three Greek Scribes Working for Bessarion: Trivizias, Callistus, Hermonymus,” describes another major stumbling block in studying medieval Greek manuscripts.  It is often difficult to assign a particular manuscript to a place, time, or scribe unless it has a colophon making these things obvious.  Both uncials and miniscule scripts overlapped for much of Byzantine history.  Because Byzantium was such a conservative empire for much of its history (at least in a literary sense), scripts tended to remain in use even as new ones came into being.  This has led to many scholars confusing scribes.  One of the more dramatic cases is the Georges of Crete.  He was originally thought of as a scribe of just one manuscript, but other manuscripts without colophons but bearing a similar style were assigned to George.  These manuscripts were later discovered to be from different scribes, but their names were unknown.  Thus, George of Crete became the Georges of Crete.

This particular essay goes into the identities of the different scribes called the Georges of Crete.  There were three of them, and none were actually named George.  These three scribes lived and worked in the period following the Fall of Constantinople.  They worked mainly in Venice (but their manuscripts were found in Crete).  These three represented the movement of Greek scholars and scribes into Italy and Western Europe after the Ottoman invasion.  They helped to bring about the Renaissance in Italy and were the ones responsible for the distinctive Greek script from that time.  That script was mentioned a few posts back as being a rather simple and clear script.  It was designed almost exclusively to teach to Italians and Western Europeans who had no knowledge of Greek cursive.