Scholarship

Scribes and scholars in Byzantium

Article by:

Georgi Parpulov

Byzantine manuscripts were created by and for educated men both in Constantinople and further afield. Georgi Parpulov explores the lives and works of some of these figures.

Ancient libraries

Article by:

Matthew Nicholls

How were books stored and accessed in the ancient world? Matthew Nicholls explores what the surviving evidence of ancient books can tell us about libraries in antiquity.

Greek in Elizabethan England

Article by:

Matthew Adams

The teaching of Greek in English schools developed slowly and not without setbacks. Matthew Adams tells the story of how Greek spread in 16th-century England.

Byzantine libraries

Article by:

Georgi Parpulov

Byzantine scribes and authors refer repeatedly to book collections and libraries. Georgi Parpulov outlines what private, monastic and imperial libraries were like in medieval Byzantium.

The transmission of Greek philosophy and medicine

Article by:

Aileen Das

Ancient Greek philosophy and medical writing were extremely influential on later thought, both in the West and in the East. Aileen Das traces some of the strands of this remarkable journey, from Greek to Syriac, Arabic, and Latin.

Knowledge of Greek in the medieval Latin West

Article by:

Dr Cillian O’Hogan

After late antiquity, knowledge of Greek declined in Latin-speaking Western Europe. Although Greek would not be taught widely in the West again until the Renaissance, a number of manuscripts indicate that there was interest in learning about Greek letters during the Middle Ages, as Cillian O’Hogan explains.

Greek manuscripts from the dawn of print

The development of printing in the 15th century signalled huge changes for the spread of Greek knowledge in Western Europe. Here, Eugenia Russell describes the key events in the early years of Greek printed books.

British collectors of Greek manuscripts

Article by:

Dr Cillian O’Hogan

Cillian O’Hogan surveys how a number of manuscripts came to be in the British Library through the actions of successive British collectors over the centuries.

Book epigrams in Byzantine manuscripts

Article by:

Julie Boeten, Sien De Groot

Byzantines were famous for inscribing verses in and on important objects including books. In this article, Julie Boeten and Sien de Groot explore the content, function and value of these so-called book epigrams.