Transmissions

The Bibliothèque Nationale de France preserves an extraordinary document: a fourth-century CE papyrus codex from Upper Egypt. This handbook is over seventy inscribed pages long and is equivalent in length to four or five normal-sized papyrus rolls. But despite its great size, it contains only fifty-three recipes, many of unusual length and complexity. Our research team on the Transmission of Magical Knowledge project has been studying, re-editing and translating all the magical handbooks from Roman Egypt, and in the process, we have realized that the Paris Codex from Upper Egypt, long understood as the "typical" or "model" handbook of the age, is, in fact, a marvelous outlier in the group. The manuscript was probably never used for the preparation of quotidian magical spells, but rather as a book to be read and to fire the imagination of its readers. We propose in this volume a complete re-assessment of GEMF 57, not only of its materiality, scribal production, and its language, but also of its composition in different blocks coming from divergent exemplars.

The book is distributed into five sections: 1. Materiality of GEMF 57, including codicology, paleography and scribal practice; 2. Language and Rhetoric; 3. Poetry, on the metrical sections; 4. Special sections, including chapters on the Mithras Liturgy, the collapse of Solomon and the Epistolary section; 5. Special topics, on astrology and Egyptian influence.

On May 25th, 2025, Christian Brockmann, Professor of Greek Studies at the University of Hamburg, reaches 65 years of age. His work mainly falls into the fields of Greek Philology, Palaeography, and Manuscript Studies, covering a variety of topics such as Philosophy (Aristotle and Plato), Comedy (Aristophanes), Medicine (Galen), and Lexicography (Etymologicum Gudianum). On the occasion of his 65th birthday, the editors of the volume want to honour him with a Festschrift including papers by his closest friends and colleagues dealing with dynamics of textual transmission, production, circulation, and conservation processes of written culture, from a material and a theoretical point of view.

This volume sheds light on the complexity of working with texts that are transmitted secondarily, described as "fragments" in classical philology. With thirteen chapters spanning the problematics of fragment terminology, transmission, editing, and interpretation, it provides rigorous and methodologically useful insights into the challenges of researching fragments.

During the sixteenth century, antiquarian studies (the study of the material past, comprising modern archaeology, epigraphy, and numismatics) rose in Europe in parallel to the technical development of the printing press. Some humanists continued to prefer the manuscript form to disseminate their findings – as numerous fair copies of sylloges and treatises attest –, but slowly the printed medium grew in popularity, with its obvious advantages but also its many challenges. As antiquarian printed works appeared, the relationship between manuscript and printed sources also became less linear: printed copies of earlier works were annotated to serve as a means of research, and printed works could be copied by hand – partially or even completely.

This book explores how antiquarian literature (collections of inscriptions, treatises, letters...) developed throughout the sixteenth century, both in manuscript and in print; how both media interacted with each other, and how these printed antiquarian works were received, as attested by the manuscript annotations left by their early modern owners and readers.

The National University Library of Turin holds more than 300 Greek manuscripts (9th-16th century), most of them from Gavriil Seviros (d. 1616), a theologian and spiritual leader of the Confraternity of the Greeks of Venice. The new catalog is planned in five volumes; the first includes 23 codices (shelfmark B.I.1-23) together with an overview of the formation and development of the Greek manuscript collection of Turin. The descriptions are analytical and take into account all external and internal aspects.

Manuscripts from the Byzantine era hand down lists of outstanding Greek authors or canons in the various literary and scientific-philosophical genres, but there has been a lack of research into their nature, chronology, origin, formation and use. The volume Παραδείγματα, the term used in rhetorical texts to designate the canons, provides a new critical edition of these lists as a basis for the topics discussed.

One of the lists, hitherto thought to be unitary, turns out to be composed of two originally independent and diachronic lists, later joined into one: an older one, dating back at least in part to Alexandrian philology, and another possibly from the 5th-6th century AD with additions up to the 9th, formed between Alexandria and Constantinople. A later list of canons, referable to the 13th-14th centuries, proves to be different from the previous ones, reflecting all-Byzantine instances partly intrinsic to Byzantine orthodoxy since it includes Church Fathers and theologians, partly resulting from cultural turning points of the 11th-12th centuries, partly inspired by the Second Sophistic.

The groups and authors of each list were then examined, recalling their geo-historical context, activity, production and textual tradition, and their place in Serorian scholarship. Finally, the lists were compared with the canons transposed or reformulated by Byzantine scholars and scholars. The volume may prove useful to those concerned with ancient literary and scientific-philosophical canons, the history of scholarship, the use of the classics and the Church Fathers in Byzantium.

At the dawn of the Renaissance, Liber Catulli was difficult to read not only for the text but also for the arrangement of the poems: few were identified, even less had titles or graphical devices to mark them. After a century, nevertheless, the book became a poetic collection in modern terms: what happened?
This work provides an overview of the process, comparing paratestual evidences in latest manuscripts and first printed editions of Catullus, in order to better understand his concrete transmission, types of book or poem titles used by scribes and their relations with the meaning of the text. Following a time criterion, the author collected the most relevant paratextual facts in witnesses, searching for the innovations and constants: the first seems to coincide with philological vanguards of the XV century, while the second sheds useful lights on contamination phenomenon, that deeply affects the transmission of Catullus. This book helps to trace an outline of the comprehension of the poems and fata libelli from the late XIV to early XVI century.

"Heteronomous texts" are texts that are updated through selection and processed on different levels – academic, cultural, formal, aesthetic – thereby developing their own idiosyncratic "autonomy," which has contributed to the development of Europe’s intellectual foundations. Ten studies present heteronomous texts from antiquity and the middle ages, from the fields of theology and philosophy, medicine and law.

The rediscovery and revaluation of ancient Greek philosophy was one of the most relevant results of the rebirth of the classical studies in the Renaissance, and, thanks to pivotal figures such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, Platonism became a cornerstone in the history of Western thought. Nevertheless, before the flowering of Platonic studies, a struggle between the supporters of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy exploded: this is the so-called Plato-Aristotle controversy.
The key figures of this controversy were George of Trebizond, who produced a treatise against Plato, and Cardinal Bessarion, who replied to George of Trebizond in the In calumniatorem Platonis. Shortly after, Bessarion’s protégées Domizio Calderini and Niccolò Perotti wrote two treatises in support of his patron, which represent the most significant products of the last stage of the Plato-Aristotle controversy.
In this volume I reconstructed the different phases of the controversy, and then I focused on Calderini and Perotti’s works, that I edited, translated and commented for the first time. The book provides the first general overview on the Plato-Aristotle controversy, and an in-depth analysis of these two treatises, which were produced at the crossroad of Platonism, Medieval philosophy and Modern thought.

This investigation sheds light on Isaac Argyrus and his scholarly work in 14th-century Constantinople on the basis of his book production: it　thus fills a major desideratum of cultural-historical, paleographical, and textual critical studies on the Palaeologan Age.

After a brief introduction summing up the state of the art, the available textual sources are discussed in order to define the timeframe of Argyrus' life and to gather all information about him and his career. A complete lists of the manuscript collection copied by Argyrus introduces the pivotal aspect of the research: the analysis of Argyrus’ handwriting in relation with the contemporary graphic context. Since Argyrus seems to have mastered two types of handwriting, a formal one and a cursive one, his graphic training must have been based on two differed models: on the one side the hand of his teacher, Nicephorus Gregoras, on the other one a writing style widespread in the XIV century, known as Τῶν῾ Οδηγῶν. The paleographical point of view leads also to the reconstruction of Argyrus' scholarly enviroment, through a detailed description of hands of the scribes who collaborated with him. The writing procedure followed by Argyrus in the composition of his theological treatises eanbles a sound definition of his skills as author.

Descriptive reports of each analysed codex conclude the volume.

This book shows an example how the use and analysis of material sources, such as manuscripts, can give a innovative and fruitful perspective in investigation about the scholary writings practices in the Byzantine age.

Members of the Church of the East, also called the East Syrians, were spread across Persia, India, and China. For centuries, their schools throughout these areas spread the educational curriculum of late antiquity from the fifth and sixth centuries. This book examines the presence and function of Greek knowledge in various works, documenting how the East Syrians became a hub of exchange between Greek, Persian and Early Islamic cultures.

The purpose of this volume is to investigate scholastic culture in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, with a particular focus on ancient book and material culture as well as scholarship beyond Greek authors and the Greek language. Accordingly, one of the major contributions of this work is the inclusion of multiple perspectives and its contributors engage not only with elements of Greek scholastic culture, but also bring Greek ideas into conversation with developing Latin scholarship (see chapters by Dickey, Nicholls, Marshall) and the perspective of a minority culture (i.e., Jewish authors) (see chapters by Hezser, Adams). This multicultural perspective is an important next step in the discussion of ancient scholarship and this volume provides a starting point for future inquiries.

What does writing Greek books mean at the height of the Cinquecento in Venice? The present volume provides fascinating insights into Greek-language book production at a time when printed books were already at a rather advanced stage of development with regards to requests, purchases and exchanges of books; copying and borrowing practices; relations among intellectuals and with institutions, and much more. Based on the investigation into selected institutional and private libraries – in particular the book collection of Gabriel Severos, guide of the Greek Confraternity in Venice – the authors present new pertinent evidence from Renaissance books and documents, discuss methodological questions, and propose innovative research perspectives for a sociocultural approach to book histories.