Book Epigrams, Verse Scholia and Some Limit Cases: Versified Paratexts on Historiography and Their Interplay, lecture by Julián Bértola (Ghent University), Ghent University via Zoom, December 14, 2021, 4:00 pm (CET)

In this presentation I will investigate how other book epigrams can contribute to the study of verse scholia, my main research interest. Verse scholia constitute a special type of book epigrams since they comment on particular passages of the main text next to which they are copied. During my work with unedited cycles of verse scholia on historians, the co-occurrence in the manuscripts of a more common type of book epigrams, namely colophons, has proven to be of great help to better understand the context in which the verse scholia were produced.

My first case study is a long poem in hexameters, a scribal epigram that dedicates the volume to a patron of high social rank. I will introduce the verse scholia that occur together with this book epigram in two manuscripts of Herodotus from the 15th century. The court circulation of the exemplar from which our manuscripts derive could account for a certain didactic and gnomic tone of the verse scholia. The second case study is a shorter dodecasyllabic epigram at the end of the Vindobonensis Hist. gr. 53, a famous manuscript of Niketas Choniates. The colophon attests to the restoration of the manuscript on behalf of the bishop of Ainos. This information supports the evidence from the verse scholia copied in this manuscript that largely reproduce the wording of the chronicle in verse by Ephraim of Ainos. The manuscript and possibly its model may have been in Ainos where Ephraim composed the verse scholia. To conclude, I will present some limit cases: a poem in f. 168v of Vat. gr. 163 (Niketas Choniates) and https://www.dbbe.ugent.be/occurrences/17771 (John Zonaras). These are book epigrams that refer to specific passages, but do not correspond in full to the typology of verse scholia because of their position in the manuscript, their layout and their content.

Julián Bértola is a Postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) at Ghent University with the project “Byzantine scholia on historians and the literature of marginalia: reading and writing practices in the margins of medieval Greek manuscripts”.

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.