BiblioVault - Books about Paleography, Greek

A Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann with the collaboration of Pablo Alvarez

University of Michigan Press, 2021

A Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor is a comprehensive, fully illustrated catalogue of the largest collection of Greek manuscripts in America, including 110 codices and fragments ranging from the fourth to the nineteenth century. The collection, held in the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Michigan Library, contains many manuscripts from Epirus and the Meteora monasteries built on high pinnacles of rocks in Thessaly. Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann has based the manuscript descriptions on the latest developments in the fields of paleography and codicology, including the newest recommendations of the Institute for Research and History of Texts in Paris. The catalogue includes high-resolution plates of all the manuscripts, allowing researchers to compare the entries with other Greek manuscripts around the world. This catalogue contains a trove of fascinating information related to Byzantine culture that will be available for the first time to scholars working on various disciplines of the humanities such as Classical and Byzantine Studies, Art History, Medieval Studies, Theology, and History.
This is the first volume of a projected two-volume set. Volume 2, also by Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann, will contain descriptions of remaining Greek manuscripts in the Library’s collection, starting with Mich. Ms. 59 and ending with Mich. Ms. 238, for a total of 53 manuscripts and 8 fragments. Both volumes will have the same format – catalogue entries for each manuscript together with extensive illustrations. The publication date for Volume 2 has not been established.

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Classics from Papyrus to the Internet

An Introduction to Transmission and Reception

By Jeffrey M. Hunt, R. Alden Smith, and Fabio Stok

University of Texas Press, 2017

Winner, PROSE Award, Classics, Association of American Publishers (AAP), 2018

Writing down the epic tales of the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus in texts that became the Iliad and the Odyssey was a defining moment in the intellectual history of the West, a moment from which many current conventions and attitudes toward books can be traced. But how did texts originally written on papyrus in perhaps the eighth century BC survive across nearly three millennia, so that today people can read them electronically on a smartphone?

Classics from Papyrus to the Internet provides a fresh, authoritative overview of the transmission and reception of classical texts from antiquity to the present. The authors begin with a discussion of ancient literacy, book production, papyrology, epigraphy, and scholarship, and then examine how classical texts were transmitted from the medieval period through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the modern era. They also address the question of reception, looking at how succeeding generations responded to classical texts, preserving some but not others. This sheds light on the origins of numerous scholarly disciplines that continue to shape our understanding of the past, as well as the determined effort required to keep the literary tradition alive. As a resource for students and scholars in fields such as classics, medieval studies, comparative literature, paleography, papyrology, and Egyptology, Classics from Papyrus to the Internet presents and discusses the major reference works and online professional tools for studying literary transmission.

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Dated Greek Manuscripts of the Thirteen and Fourteenth Centuries in the Libraries of Great Britain

Alexander Turyn

Harvard University Press, 1980

Professor Turyn has published books on Greek manuscripts in the Vatican Library, and here he examines book scripts and subscriptions from the dated Greek manuscripts in the libraries of Great Britain.

These to-scale facsimile reproductions, one hundred ninety-eight in total, provide ample paleographical material that will help in dating other manuscripts. The author presents the chronological evidence and extensively interprets the prosopographical and linguistic elements of the manuscripts. At the same time he elucidates the origins of a manuscript, its character as a document of Byzantine culture, and its role in the transmission of ancient and medieval Greek literature.

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