Authorial Intent or Kreis Project? The Role of Paratexts in Reconstructing the Editio Nicephori

This paper examines key aspects of the manuscript tradition of the theological writings of Patriarch Nikephoros I (758–828), with the aim of illuminating the subtle boundary between the author’s own editorial planning and a later phase of redaction carried out by a learned circle—perhaps under the guidance of Patriarch Methodios—which reorganized the corpus after Nikephoros’ death. Recent research undertaken for the critical edition of the Antirrhetici I–II, later extended to all the texts shared by the manuscript tradition, has underscored the crucial role of paratextual elements. These features, consistently attested in the earliest witnesses, likely go back to Nikephoros himself and point to the deliberate creation, already at the stage of the Urtext, of a two-volume edition of his theological works. Furthermore, the important discovery of the entire index—previously known only in fragments—of the 343 chapters of “the great treatise against the first iconoclasm” (A. Chryssostalis), in an Oxford manuscript copied from the ancient Parisinus gr. 911, has made it possible to reconstruct in detail the dynamics of the extensive redactional activity on the editio Nicephori, undertaken after the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” in 843. Drawing on the manuscript evidence, the analysis of marginal annotations, together with a close examination of the now fully accessible pinax and its inconsistencies, offers direct insight into the multi-stage editorial process that shaped the transmission and final configuration of Nikephoros’ theological corpus.