P.Oxy. 1.5 and the Codex Sangermanensis as “visionary living texts”: visionary habitus and processes of “textualization” and/or “scripturalization” in Late Antiquity

Abstract

: This paper aims at analyzing two cases of individual scribal interventions on visionary texts of late antiquity: the Papyrus from Oxhyrhynchus n. 5 (3rd – 4th century CE ), a text containing a passage from Hermas ’ Mand . 11.9 — 10, and a manuscript of IV Ezra , the so-called Sangermanensis Codex (9th century CE ). Both the cases reveal figures of entrepreneurs (the scribe? or the customer?) engaged in related typologies of individual acquisition/intervention, appropria-tion, modification, and transposition. Both the analyzed manuscripts reveal cases of re-formulation connected to a specific late-antique “ religious ” habitus, i.e. the visionary habitus, a cognitive and socio-cultural pattern from which processes of re-proposition and re-contextualization of previous authoritative accounts in and for specific environments seem to stem.