Download PDF | Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann, collab. Pablo Alvarez, A Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, 2021.
357 Pages
Preface
Why This Catalogue?
This two-volume catalogue contains the first richly illustrated and comprehensive description of the collection of Greek manuscripts held at the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Michigan Library. Consisting of 110 codices and fragments ranging from the fourth to the nineteenth century, the collection is the largest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. To be precise, these manuscripts have been described in the three-volume Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, which was published by Seymour De Ricci in 1935,' and in its Supplement, which was published by William Bond and Christopher Faye in 1962.” However, in both the Census and the Supplement, the University of Michigan manuscripts receive very short descriptions, and only the New Testament manuscripts are described in a more scholarly fashion in a specialized catalogue published by Kenneth Clark in 1937.? In brief, these catalogues are rather outdated and do not fulfill the demands of present-day scholars.
I was aware of these deficiencies and was very pleased when in 2010 Dr. Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann suggested to me that she would be willing to write a state-of-theart catalogue of our Greek manuscript collection. This catalogue, argued KavrusHoffmann, would meet the current needs of scholars in the humanities, including social and art historians, book historians, paleographers, philologists, philosophers, and theologians. Enthusiastically, I discussed the idea with the University of Michigan Library administration, which generously supported the project by funding Kavrus-Hoffmann’s research during her three stays in Ann Arbor in 2012 and 2013.
As in her previous works describing Greek manuscripts in American libraries,* Kavrus-Hoffmann has again written a catalogue based on original research and the latest developments in the fields of paleography and codicology, including the newest recommendations of the Institute for Research and History of Texts in Paris. In recent decades, scholars of Greek paleography and codicology have made significant progress in analyzing Greek medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. They have developed new techniques to establish the dates and origins of manuscripts, such as a detailed classification of writing materials and writing styles, and an exhaustive codification of ruling patterns and ruling systems. Moreover, new paleographic albums make it possible to identify a scribe who copied several manuscripts, and new watermark catalogues facilitate the dating of manuscripts written on paper. The application of all these tools is especially relevant in the examination of manuscripts lacking a scribal colophon or any other written evidence that reveals when, where, who, and for whom a manuscript was copied. Unquestionably, this type of information will be essential for future scholars researching our collection of Greek manuscripts.
Each manuscript entry in this catalogue reflects the latest scholarship in the codicology and paleography of Greek manuscripts. Predictably, Kavrus-Hoffmann has challenged previous descriptions of our manuscripts. For instance, she has changed the dating of various manuscripts, sometimes by one or even two centuries; she has meticulously described the content of all the manuscripts in much more detail than in past works, correcting inaccurate descriptions of contents and even identifying texts previously declared as unknown. To summarize, this catalogue contains a trove of new information that can generate and augment original research in numerous areas of the humanities, especially in Byzantine and post-Byzantine studies. Readers will access new data that bring these extraordinary manuscripts closer to the time and place in which they were originally produced, read, and transmitted.
Origin and Provenance of the Collection
It is not an exaggeration to affirm that we largely owe our extensive collection of Greek manuscripts to the efforts of Francis Willey Kelsey (1858-1927), professor of Latin language and literature at the University of Michigan from 1889 to 1927. Kelsey was a strong advocate of the role of archaeological excavations as sources of artifacts to be collected by the new museums and universities being established at the time in the United States. Eventually, his collecting and educational endeavors put him in contact with major financiers and philanthropists of that period, notably Charles Lang Freer, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan.° In numerous letters addressed to donors, colleagues, and university administrators, Kelsey described four major objectives that would ultimately guide the so-called first expedition (1919-1921), an ambitious research and collecting journey in Europe and the Middle East. The first goal of this expedition was a survey and reexamination of Julius Caesar's battlefield, primarily in France as seen in the aftermath of World War I, but also in Greece, Asia Minor, North Africa, and Egypt. The second was the photographing of ancient monuments and sites for teaching. The third was the study of manuscripts held in European libraries as well as in monasteries in Greece, Constantinople, Palestine, and Egypt. And the fourth was the acquisition of ancient artifacts, biblical manuscripts, and papyri.®
Kelsey’s decision to acquire biblical manuscripts in the Middle East was greatly shaped by the humanitarian crisis taking place in that region during and after World War I. Between 1914 and 1918, more than 2.5 million civilians lost their lives on the battlefields of the Middle East or as a result of disease and hunger. Among the civilian casualties were more than a million Armenians who were the targets of a systematic genocidal campaign organized by the Ottoman state in 1915. However, the war did not end in that area when Germany officially surrendered on November 11, 1918. While the European colonial powers discussed the fragmentation of the multiethnic territories of the Ottoman Empire, the forces of Turkish nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938) fought for independence, eventually announcing the creation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. The fact that Christian towns and monasteries were being looted and destroyed sounded the alarm among the community of European and American scholars working with ancient and medieval manuscripts. In a 1918 letter addressed to Belle da Costa Greene, librarian of the Pierpont Morgan Library, Kelsey candidly referred to the instability and humanitarian crisis of the Middle East as compelling reasons for the pursuit of manuscripts to be used for academic research:
Long before the War, Professor Caspar René Gregory,’ of the University of Leipzig, urged me to interest myself in sending a small expedition to the Orient in quest of Greek manuscripts. He said he felt sure that proper search among the more remote monasteries would bring to light manuscripts of value in Greek, not to speak of other languages, such as Syriac, and that the gain to science would be inestimable because in the rapid transformation of the Orient the danger from loss is ever greater.
As you are well aware, not only have the Armenians been practically exterminated in certain large regions of Asia Minor, but the Greeks as well are on the way to extinction unless peace comes soon enough to save the remnant. It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that there has been a complete destruction of the possessions of the Armenians and Greeks. I have the testimony of a friend who remained in the interior of Asia Minor until just before the United States entered the War.*
A year later Kelsey wrote to the millionaire and philanthropist John Munro Longyear, asking him to fund the expedition with a donation of twenty-five thousand dollars. Being aware of Longyear’s deep Christian faith, Kelsey cleverly emphasized the missionary aspect of the venture by evoking again Professor Gregory's anxiety about the need to look for biblical manuscripts:
While spending a couple of days as a guest in Ann Arbor, he urged me in the strongest terms to arrange to send an expedition to the Near East, particularly Asia Minor and Syria, in order to search out and save from destruction Biblical manuscripts still remaining in neglected corners. Though a professor in a German university, the University of Leipzig, Professor Gregory was born in the United States; and he said that he earnestly hoped that, in the interest of American scholarship, this service to Christian learning might be rendered by Americans.’
It is necessary to emphasize that in this letter, and in others with a similar purpose, Kelsey referred to the potential scholarly impact of these manuscripts by mentioning very concrete examples, such as his own role in encouraging the publication of scholarly editions based on the biblical manuscripts acquired in Egypt by Charles Freer. Unfortunately, Longyear was not entirely convinced, and he passed the letter to his wife, Mary Beecher Longyear, who in the end offered her help: “Mr. Longyear forwarded your very interesting letter to me, and I am inclined to help you in your project.”””
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