Vat.gr.19

Curatorial narrative

Vat. gr. 19 contains the Schedographia of the Byzantine Grammarian, Manuel Moschopoulos. In this work, the Byzantine author presents examples drawn from Biblical and Homeric topics to serve as educational exercises by grammatical analysis. George Baiophoros, the scribe who completed the current manuscript in 1425 (f. 118v) and wrote or annotated several other Vatican manuscripts (Vat. gr. 21, Vat. gr. 157 and Urb. gr. 154), used many recycled folios from four earlier codices as protective flyleaves in the front (ff. I-IV) and writing surface in Constantinople. The manuscript preserves its original Byzantine binding, produced at the Prodromos Monastery. The core work of the manuscript was supplied at its back with fragments from three other manuscripts, perhaps for protective reasons. The first addition (ff. 121r-122v) includes a fragment from the November volume of Symeon Metaphrastes’ collection of Saints’ Lives (Menologion), a codex copied in the eleventh-century, retelling  the Life of Saint Hiero martyr and his fellows (BHG 750) as well as Saint Pergensis (BHG 1222). One folio ( f. 123) includes a liturgical fragment. The last protective folio (f. 124) is a fragment from the spiritual treatise on the eight patterns of evil by Evagrius Ponticus, copied in the course of the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The manuscript probably arrived to the Vatican Library by Cristoforo Garatone (1398-1448) in the fifteenth-century. The list of contents in the front (ff. V-VI) was copied from Leo Allatius’ catalogue in the seventeenth century. Angelo Mai used the initial erased but not rewritten folios (ff. IIv-IIIr) as test material for the various alternatives of chemical reagents probably immediately after his arrival at the Vatican Library in 1819.

Bibliography; Pinakes.