Latin Glosses in Greek Manuscripts of the 13th-—14th Centuries in St. Petersburg: a Tribute to the History of Greek Studies in the Middle Ages
KARNACHOV Alexander, Institut d’Histoire de Saint-Pétersbourg
A certain number of medieval Greek manuscripts were read by the Latin, who left their marks and notes inside. What’s more, some of these books were even written, or composed, or edited in the West by medieval erudites. Surprisingly enough, it took place at least a century before the dawn of the Renaissance time, when the study of Greek once again started to resume its significance in the West. Sometimes Latin glosses and corrections are essential to the history of medieval Byzantine manuscripts, and by no means we could not ignore them.
Vice versa: when we come across Greek interlinear suprascriptions in a 10th century Beneventan manuscript, which provenance, to be sure, is bound up with the earliest history of multicultural monastic republic of Athos, it suggests a pretty unusual attempt of some learned Greek to master a foreign language of the Holy Script or, may be, even to make it common to his brethren. Later, due to the deterioration of the religious controversy between the Catholics and the Orthodox, Latin thoroughly vanished from the Hagion Oros and from everywhere in the East, but we have traces of its perception in the remnants, preserved in the book depositaries of Moscow (State Historical Museum) and Paris (BNF).
Palaeographical and philological data, obtained through the research, are being considered as instruments of recovering of any possible clues to the history of manuscripts themselves and to the general history of the Greek studies in the Middle Ages.