Exploring Greek Manuscripts in the Library at Wellcome Collection in London
This book offers new insights into a largely understudied group of Greek texts preserved in selected manuscripts from the Library at Wellcome Collection, London. The content of these manuscripts ranges from medicine, including theories on diagnosis and treatment of disease, to astronomy, philosophy, and poetry. With texts dating from the ancient era to the Byzantine and Ottoman worlds, each manuscript provides its own unique story, opening a window onto different social and cultural milieus. All chapters are illustrated with black and white and colour figures, highlighting some of the most significant codices in the collection.
Petros Bouras-Vallianatos is Wellcome Lecturer in History of Medicine at The University of Edinburgh.
Paschal table with concentric circles, from Londiniensis Wellcomensis MS.MSL.60, f. 61r.
The Library at Wellcome Collection, London.
First published 2020
by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bouras-Vallianatos, Petros, editor.
Title: Exploring Greek manuscripts in the Library at Wellcome Collection in London / edited by Petros Bouras-Vallianatos.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019059089 (print) | LCCN 2019059090 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138601598 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429470035 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Wellcome Library. | Manuscripts, GreekEnglandLondon. | Paleography, Greek.
Classification: LCC Z6621.W383 G744 2020 (print) | LCC Z6621.W383 (ebook) | DDC 011/.31dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059089
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059090
ISBN: 978-1-138-60159-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-47003-5 (ebk)
To Richard Aspin
Frontispiece: Paschal table with concentric circles, from Londiniensis Wellcomensis MS.MSL.60, f. 61r. The Library at Wellcome Collection, London
This edited volume emerged out of an international symposium on Greek Manuscripts at the Wellcome Library, which took place on 25 May 2017 at the Wellcome Trust Gibbs Building in London. This conference would not have been possible without the generous support of the Library at Wellcome Collection. The Library and the Wellcome Trust kindly provided me with digital images and covered the Open Access publishing costs respectively. I am grateful to all the speakers and chairs (Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, Dimitrios Skrekas, Peregrine Horden) for contributing to the lively discussion during the conference. I would like also to thank Marjolijne Janssen, Marc Lauxtermann, and Georgi Parpulov for their inspiring papers, although these do not appear in the present volume. Special thanks go to Michael Greenwood from Routledge for his professionalism and the several anonymous peer reviewers for their comments. I am also grateful to Elder Ephraim, the Abbot of the Holy and Great Monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos for allowing reproduction of the image from Codex Vatopedinus 188. My sincere thanks also go to the Wellcome librarians for facilitating in situ access to manuscripts during my several visits to the Library and especially to Elma Brenner, Nikolai Serikoff, and Stefania Signorello. This project would not have been possible without the overwhelming support of Richard Aspin, who was Head of Research in the Wellcome Library when my descriptive catalogue of the Greek collection was being produced. He also envisaged and helped with the organisation of the international symposium and warmly encouraged the production of this volume, which is wholeheartedly dedicated to him.
Petros Bouras-Vallianatos
Edinburgh
November 2019
Nikos Agiotis is a Research Associate of Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca et Byzantina at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Berlin. His main interests are in Byzantine and post-Byzantine Aristotelianism. His publications include Inventarisierung von Scholien, Glossen und Diagrammen der handschriftlichen berlieferung zu Aristoteles De Interpretatione (c. 14) (2015) and Leon Magentenos, Commentary on Prior Analytics (Book II) (in print). He is currently working on the critical edition of an anonymous Byzantine commentary on Prior Analytics II, as well as of two anonymous Aristotelian texts in the palimpsest Athens, EBE 192.
Petros Bouras-Vallianatos is Wellcome Lecturer in History of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely on Byzantine medicine and pharmacology, cross-cultural medical exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, the reception of the classical medical tradition in the Middle Ages, and Greek palaeography, including the first descriptive catalogue of the Greek manuscripts at the Wellcome Library in London. He is the author of Innovation in Byzantine Medicine: The Writings of John Zacharias Aktouarios (c.1275c.1330) (Oxford University Press, 2020) and has co-edited Greek Medical Literature and its Readers: From Hippocrates to Islam and Byzantium (Routledge, 2018) and Brills Companion to the Reception of Galen (Brill, 2019).
Tina Lendari is Assistant Professor in Medieval Vernacular and Early Modern Greek Language and Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her research and publications include textual criticism, linguistic analysis, and literary theory as applied to medieval and early modern Greek literature. She has produced the editio princeps of the romance Livistros and Rodamne, version V, and is one of the co-authors of the Cambridge Grammar of Medieval and Early Modern Greek (CUP, 2019). Her new edition of the romance Velthandros and Chrysantza is near completion.
Orly Lewis is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Classics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is leading a research project on Greco-Roman anatomy (ERC Starting Grant). She has published on ancient anatomy, physiology and diagnosis, and on the relationship between theory and practice in ancient scientific method. Her award-winning monograph (Brill, 2017) is a philological and historical study of Praxagoras of Cos ideas on pneuma and the vascular system.
