Some Poetic Multiple-Text Manuscripts of the Byzantine Era

Abstract

: The paper focuses on some Byzantine manuscripts which consist of collections of Greek poetic texts and are linked to each other: (a) the lost poetic book of Constantine Cephalas and its main descendants, and (b) the poetic multi-ple-text manuscripts (MTMs) created in the circle of Maximus Planudes. A com-parison between the structure and the purposes of some of these MTMs and the epigrammatic anthologies they include is also provided. In the final part of the paper, epigrammatic collections are also used as a case study on what MTMs can tell about the perception and the contexts in which the literary works they contain came to fruition.