Interconnected Codicological Data and the Teaching of Greek in Late Byzantium

Byzantine grammar textbooks are mainly transmitted as manuscript miscellanies of unstable structure: they were assembled as ad hoc sets of texts for given educational purposes, and over time they could be reorganized and supplemented. Therefore, extant manuscripts containing Greek grammatical texts often comprise codicological units that originated at different phases of the book’s history. That is why an apparently uninterrupted sequence of treatises can turn out to be a conglomerate of reordered parts. If characteristics of single codicological units are collected in a systematic way, namely in a database, we get the opportunity to establish links between now separate manuscripts, reconstruct their original composition and reveal relations between scribes, teachers and pupils. Besides, a systematic cross-manuscript analysis of codicological data helps tracing common Byzantine patterns of textbook arrangement. In this paper, I will attempt to illustrate the above arguments using data gathered in the framework of the project MELA.