Part III. The Manuscript

The manuscript Marciana Gr. Z. 11 (379) is at the core of the project HumaReC. We have seen in the previous section (Chapter 3) that the manuscript viewer is a central piece of the digital platform. In addition to the access to the images and the transcription of the manuscript, the project engages in a subsential academic study of this object.

Marciana Gr. Z. 11 (379) is unique in many ways: it contains Acts, the Catholic Epistles and the Letters of Paul, it is also the only known trilingual New Testament manuscript in Greek, Arabic, and Latin. It is listed number 460 in the Gregory-Aland list. Despite all these factors, the manuscript has never been studied in detail and is only described in catalogues (see [Zanetti 1740]; [Mioni 1985) or mentioned very briefly in textual criticism works (see the 8.1. Preliminary remarks for a state of the art).

To begin with, the chapter 7 in part III will investigate the physical characteristics of the manuscript and its possible context of production: the Norman kingdom of Sicily. Thereafter, the text of the (proto-) Pauline letters in Greek, Latin and Arabic will be carefully considered (chapter 8). Among other important clues, we will see that the Arabic text is of Latin origin and finds its roots in Al-Andalus. In chapter 9, we will draw some conclusions about the use that was made of the codex.