Il μουσεῖον di Prodromos Petra e una famiglia mononucleare di codici di Eustazio

This contribution attempts to investigate a family of five manuscripts, which, partially or entirely, transmits what is likely to be the last work of Eustathios of Thessaloniki: the Exegesis in canonem iambicum pentecostalem, i.e. a thorough commentary on one of the canons of Cosma’s and John’s corpus, in keep with the high standard of Eustathian previous teaching style. The author bases her argument onto two levels. Firstly, on philological, codicological and paleographical grounds, the author argues that the entirety of the manuscript tradition depends on a single subarchetype β, which she proposes to identify with the deperditus Scorialensis L.II.11. Secondly, by reconstructing the historia codicum of the surviving members of the family, she demonstrates that most of the exemplars can be traced back to the library, the scriptorium and probably also to that centre of teaching and cultural transmission that was the μουσεῖον of the Constantinopolitan monastery of Prodromos Petra. More specifically, the author hypothesizes that (a) β might be the last tome of an authorisierte Eustathiosedition, the existence of which was conjectured by Peter Wirth; (b) that it was to be found in Prodromos Petra as early as the second half of the 1190s, as already put forward suo Marte by Ernst Gamillscheg; (c) and that, preserved there during the Latin occupation of the Fourth Crusade, such exemplar generated the manuscript tradition of the Exegesis shortly after the Byzantine reconquest of the Polis. Combined with the appraisal of the aliae manus and their glosses, which over the centuries were added to the main text, this analysis suggests that in the same monastery survived, at an extracurricular level, that high profile rhetorical-ecclesiastical teaching based on the exegesis of the hymnographic corpus of Cosmas and John, which the Eustathian work testifies to, and which deteriorated after the transfer of the Patriarchal institutions to Nicaea, but could have been even previously set in the μουσεῖον of Prodromos Petra, whose familiarity to Eustathius himself has been shown by the author in an earlier contribution. It can be inferred that the floruit of the μονή τοῦ Προδρόμου not only as a monastic institution, a library and a scriptorium, but also as a leading university centre, in which the best scholars of Constantinople taught, could be placed before the Paleologan re-establishment, and perhaps as early as the XII century.