A Descriptive Catalogue of the Greek Manuscript Collection of Lambeth Palace Library by Christopher Wright et al.

The Lambeth Palace Library owns fifty-five Greek manuscripts. Some have philologically interesting contents: there are works by the fifteenth-century theologian Gennadius Scholarius, annotated in the author's own hand (MS. 461), supposedly unpublished anonymous homilies (MS. 1197), apparently unpublished polemical dialogues against Judaism (MS. 2794, fols. 272r–292r), a sixteenth-century chronicle in vernacular Greek (MS. 1199), and a group of rare late-Byzantine hymnographic canons (MS. Sion L40.2/G11, fols. 5r–71v). Several are important from a paleo-graphic point of view, being precisely dated and/or signed by the scribes who copied them (MSS. 1177, 1183, 1188, 1195, 1214, Sion L40.2/G6, Sion L40.2/G10, Sion L40.2/G12). A couple contain figural miniatures, remarkable in one case (MS. 1176) for their relatively early date, and in another (MS. Sion L40.2/G5) for their unusual iconography. The covers of three are finely decorated (MSS. 1187, 1188, Sion L40.2/G9). A dozen consist of notes by learned Western Europeans of the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries, which are, I suppose, valuable for the history of scholarship.

The collection has now been painstakingly inventoried by Christopher Wright, a Byzantinist, and Maria Argyrou, a book conservator. Charalambos Dendrinos oversaw their work, and a number of other scholars (listed on pp. 7–9) provided them with expert advice. Wright and Argyrou's admirable descriptions of the books' handwriting, binding, and current condition are the fullest of their kind in any existing catalog of Greek manuscripts. The quality of the photographic illustrations is very high, and I do wish there had been some more of them: MS. 1176, p. 417; MS. Sion L40.2/G1, fols. 244r–245r; MS. Sion L40.2/G5, fol. Br–v; MS. Sion L40.2/G7, fol. 1v; MS. Sion L40.2/G11, fol. 71v; and a sample page from the first part (fols. 1–86) of MS. Sion L40.2/G12. In a few respects, the publication seems to me to fall slightly short of the ideal standards for accuracy and exhaustiveness. I list such minor defects under the headings that recur in each volume's description:

Gatherings. Gatherings (quires) normally consist of an even number of leaves. In those cases when a quire is not at the end of a text unit and when it contains, say, seven instead of the expected eight leaves (e.g., pp. 52, 68, 88, 103, 119, 129, 139, 170), readers ought to be told whether this irregularity entails loss of text and where precisely the single leaf is located (e.g., "fol. 35 singleton").

Detailed content. It would not have been too hard to list the CPG numbers for patristic texts (e.g., pp. 298, 375), the BHG numbers for hagiographical ones (pp. 375, 507–8), or the CANT numbers for apocrypha (p. 298). (See the list of bibliographic abbreviations below.) All relatively uncommon texts—not just some of them—ought to have been identified by their title, beginning (inicipit), ending (desinit), and a reference to a printed edition (if one exists): compare Wright's description of the contents of MS. Sion L40.2/G6 to the more informative one by Aubineau (cit. pp. 34, 469). It would have been useful to point out that the "unidentified text attributed to Metropolitan Niketas of Klaudiopolis" (p. 375) is composed in fifteen-syllable ("political") verse and has been edited in print (cf. I. Vassis, Initia carmonum Byzantinorum, [Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005], p. 70), or that Damascenus Stoudites's Physiologus (p. 507) was recently republished (L. Manou, Δαμασκηνός ο Στουδίτης: Ο βίος και το έργο του [Athens: Σύνδεσμος των εν Αθήναις Μεγαλοσχολιτών, 1999], pp. 149–83). Sometimes editions are listed under "Bibliography" at the end of an entry: one can guess, for example, that Scholarius's treatise On the Procession of the Holy Spirit, found in MS. 461, is printed in volume 2 of his Oeuvres complètes (p. 50)—but on which pages exactly? In other instances, a text can be read from a photograph: this is probably why neither incipit nor desinit is given for the "letter of July 1405 from the Bishop of Syllion to Metropolitan of Attaleia" on folio Ir of MS. 461 (pp. 45–46). A few cases remain, however, where it is simply impossible to tell (without visiting the Lambeth Palace Library) precisely what a manuscript contains: Which alphabetical verses by Nicephorus Ouranus fill folios 241v–245r of MS. 2794 (p. 375)? What is the poem (epigram) in honor of St. John the Evangelist on folio 257r of MS. 2795 (p. 387)? What hymns are found on folios 39v–41v and 126r–165v of MS. Sion L40.2/G9 (p. 484)? Which evening prayer is written on folio 86r of MS. Sion L40.2/G12 (p. 507)?

Text leaves. Paper manuscripts can often be dated on the basis of their watermarks. The catalogers' identification of the latter is occasionally far too general to be of use: "fish watermark" (p. 114), "crown watermark" (p. 201), "ring watermark" (p. 379), "Π-shaped watermark" (p. 503), "armorial watermark topped with crown and text below" (p. 509). And is the paper in MS. 1205 or the "Western handmade paper, medium thickness, off-white colour" (p. 306) in MS. 1199 watermarked at all?

Binding description. It would have been helpful to define the terms "Greek style," "German style" (pp. 306, 488), and "Italian style" (pp. 165, 202) used in the catalog (cf. the Glossary, pp. 41–44). I do not know—and I cannot easily find out—what the latter two mean.

Dating. Manuscript catalogers seldom explain why they have ascribed to this or that century codices that are not securely datable. Wright deserves great credit for having done so on each occasion, and for having discovered that MS. Sion L40.2/G6 can be dated with precision to AD 1013/14 (p. 468). It is a pity that his explanations are often limited to "style of hand [X] consistent with [X] century" (pp. 58, 75, 87, 94, 102, 108, 117, 138, 168, 189, 204, etc.), which is just another way of saying "this manuscript seems to me to date from the [X] century." I disagree with a few dates proposed in the catalog: MS. 528 is copied in an archaizing hand, hence it must be a product of the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century (cf. Spatharakis, nos. 212, 222, 240, 245). MSS. 1176 and 1194 display an early form of Perlschrift from circa AD 950–1000 (cf. Lake, nos. 16, 44, 45, 86, 87, 124, 125). Pages 1–68, 75–76, and 755–93 in MS. 1182 are evidently of the fifteenth or sixteenth century—but certainly not the fourteenth (cf. Spatharakis, no. 514). The minuscule writing in MS. 1186 can be assigned to the early tenth century (cf. Lake, no. 52; A. Aletta, "La «minuscola quadrata»," Rivista di studi bizantini e neoellenici II.44 [2007]: 97–128). Wright correctly notes that MS. 1192 is written in minuscule bouletée (p. 237); given that this is a uniquely tenth-century style of calligraphy, the manuscript cannot possibly be of eleventh-century date. (The miniature on folio 124v, on the other hand, must have been added at some point in the 1200s; cf. Spatharakis, nos. 179, 182, 195.) MS. 1205 may well be as late as the eighteenth century (cf. Komines, plates 116, 120, 123, 155, 159, 164, 170). In one case I cannot form an opinion, because the catalog includes no photographs of the respective folia: the style of hand D in MS. 1191 is declared "consistent with 12th century" (p. 234), yet the pages that it copied (p. 230) are dated to the thirteenth century (p. 224).

Some addenda and corrigenda:

• • The note on folio 14v of MS. 1176 is the beginning of a hymn in honor of the Virgin Mary; cf. M. Ajjoub, Livre d'heures du Sinaï: Sinaiticus Graecus 864 (Paris: Cerf, 2004), p. 284.

• • Petros was probably the commissioner of MS. Sion L40.2/G7, rather than its scribe (p. 472): his name appears very prominently in a dedicatory poem at the very beginning of the volume, folio 1v (it is impossible that this leaf was originally at the end of the book, since it is conjoint with folio 2, which contains the table of contents). In the poem's text (which I have checked against an unpublished photograph of the manuscript page), read πέπεικε instead of πέπεκε (p. 477).

• • The third word in the metrical (twelve-syllable) scribal colophon on page 635 of MS. 1188 is actually γραφεὶς; this was corrected to γραφεῦς by a later hand, using black ink.

• • The versified title on folio 5r of MS. Sion L40.2/G11 reads (judging from the photograph on p. 500) Σύντιμα [sic] πάντων ἐ[μμε]λὲς τῶν ἁ[γί]ων / τῶν πᾶσι κοινῆ δι['ἔτο]υς τιμωμένων. / Ἦχος τετάρτου πλάγιος τῶ κανόνι, / ὠδῆς δὲ πρώτης εἱρμὸς Ἁρματηλάτην (D. Getov, "The Unedited Byzantine Liturgical Canons in the Library of Congress Microfilms of the Greek Manuscripts in St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai," Bollettino della Badia greca di Grottaferrata III.6 [2009]: 67–118, lists under no. 217 two more manuscripts containing the same canon).

• • Finally, a brief art-historical note: The miniatures in MS. 1176 "are on extra folios inserted into the gatherings but ruled as normal" (p. 87), which suggests that the images must date, like the handwritten text for which the ruling was made, to the tenth century (cf. above). This is certainly the case with the portraits of St. Luke on page 206 and St. John on page 324, but the face of St. Mark on page 124 and the entire figure of St. Matthew on folio 15v were repainted in the late Byzantine period. It was at the same point that evangelist symbols were added in the four miniatures' top right-hand corners (cf. R. Nelson, The Iconography of Preface and Miniature in the Byzantine Gospel Book [New York: NYU Press, 1980], p. 112), while folio 15r and page 323 were filled, respectively, with scenes of the Nativity and the Resurrection. The fact that detailed observations like these can be made without recourse to the actual manuscript shows the usefulness of the new Lambeth Palace catalogue.