Hidden Paratexts: The Transmission of Paratextual Elements Within Collections of Excerpts, lecture by Ottavia Mazzon (University of Bologna), Ghent University via Zoom, November 16, 2021, 4:00 pm (CET)

Byzantine intellectuals frequently put together collections of excerpts aiming to preserve the most interesting passages they encountered while reading. Many of these have survived, especially from the Palaeologan period, allowing us to explore Byzantine scholars’ reading interests and to understand how they used their books. Whenever they read, Byzantine scholars did not exclusively focus on literary works they were studying. When consulting a codex, they also took notice of the paratexts and sometimes ended up transcribing them alongside the quotations they had selected from the main text; the paratexts thus became an integral part of excerpt collections.

The objective of my paper is to show how the DBBE is an effective tool for the identification of paratextual elements within an excerpt-collection and facilitates the reconstruction of the material characteristics of the manuscripts read by the excerptor(s), going so far as providing essential information for the recognition of the exemplar employed. I will do so by presenting examples from two excerpt collections from the early Palaeologan period which I have chosen as a case-study: the Rhodoniai of Makarios Chrysokephalos, preserved in MS Marc. gr. Z. 452 (coll. 796), and the excerpt-collection transmitted by MS Napoli, Biblioteca Nazionale, II C 32. The book epigrams preserved in the latter are partially known; Neap. II C 32 contains a poem summarizing the content of the Iliad, which accompanies the hypotheseis to each book (ff. 366r-371v).

Ottavia Mazzon is currently Frances A. Yates Long-term Fellow at the Warburg Institute and a post-doc researcher at the University of Padua. Her research interests lie at the intersection of classical philology and book history, focusing on the readership and material reception of ancient Greek literature in Byzantium and in Renaissance Europe.

In Fall 2021, the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams (DBBE), an ongoing project hosted at Ghent University, is organising the Speaking From the Margins lecture series. All lectures will take place at 4:00 pm (CET) and will be freely accessible via Zoom. No registration required. The links to the individual lectures will be broadly advertised before each lecture.