11 - Meaning from the Margins: Graphic Signs, Frames and Initials in a Ninth-Century Byzantine Manuscript

Summary

This chapter concerns how the non-narrative components of Byzantine manuscripts – marginal signs, frames, headpieces and painted initials – structure the reader’s understanding of the narrative components: both the text itself and, when relevant, the miniatures. It focuses on a single manuscript that contains all of the relevant constituent parts, the well-known Paris Gregory in Paris, BnF, cod. gr. 510.

The text is a copy of the sermons of the fourth-century Cappadocian Church Father, Gregory of Nazianzos. The manuscript’s completion can be dated on the basis of its opening imperial portraits to the years of the reign of Basil I, 867–86, and more precisely still to sometime between late 879 and mid-882, after Basil’s sons had both been elevated to the rank of co-emperor (as they are designated in the inscriptions), but before Leo’s marriage in the winter of 882 and the death of Basil’s wife, Eudokia, which followed soon thereafter.

With five prefatory and unpaginated miniatures followed by 464 folios of text, each approximately 410 mm high and 300 mm wide, the Paris Gregory is a huge book; to give a sense of scale, the Vienna Dioskourides (c. 512), another famously hefty Greek book weighing in at 14 lb, has 491 folios, and so is slightly longer than the Gregory, and at 330 mm slightly broader, but it is also less high (380 mm). Nothing else comes close. The Paris Gregory is larger than the other well-known big luxury codices of the sixth century, and it is far longer and bigger than the roughly contemporary Khludov Psalter and the heavily decorated tenth-century manuscript now known as the Paris Psalter (see Table 1). It is a manuscript devoted to displaying conspicuous consumption: Paris cod. gr. 510 incorporates fortysix full-page miniatures; the scribes wrote in the by-then old-fashioned uncial script – which is larger and takes longer to write than the recently introduced minuscule – at a stately and regular forty lines per column, with two columns per page, thus ‘wasting’ as much precious parchment as possible; wide margins were left for scholia and so that marginal notations could be inserted, and most of these are in gold leaf, often with additional painted details.