10th Century Greek Manuscript Digitized and Available for Online Viewing

    Focus on Greek immigration and Greek culture: According to a report from the University of Cambridge on March 26, the Greek manuscript numbered MSFf.1.24 has recently been digitized, and readers can browse all 535 photographs in the Cambridge Digital Library. This manuscript provides material for the study of the Greek academic tradition and the dissemination of Greek texts in medieval Western Europe.

 

 

It is reported that this manuscript was created in the 10th century in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), and in the 13th century, the English politician Robert Grosseteste sent someone to bring a copy to England. Between the 11th and 13th centuries, Western European scholars began to encounter a large number of theological, philosophical, and scientific texts in Greek, and Grosseteste was particularly keen on collecting such texts. Historical records indicate that in the late 1230s, Grosseteste learned that a Greek manuscript containing the Christian apocryphal text "Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs" was held by Michael Choniates, the Archbishop of Athens. He dispatched diplomatic envoys to Athens to bring back a copy of the manuscript and translated it into Latin. On the Cambridge Digital Library webpage, readers can zoom in on the images to see the annotations left by Grosseteste during his reading and translation process. Grosseteste's Latin translation quickly became popular, resulting in over 80 copies, which were later translated into English, French, German, and other languages.

Grosseteste later left the Greek manuscript of the "Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs" to the Franciscans in Oxford, and there were no further records for many years until the 16th century when this manuscript appeared in the library of Matthew Parker, the Archbishop of Canterbury. At that time, Parker collected a large number of ancient manuscripts and revised them to prove that the Church of England had historically been independent of the Roman Papacy. He added a Latin index to the Greek version of the "Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs," rebound it, and added page numbers.

Huw Jones, a metadata expert at the Cambridge Digital Library, stated, "The transmission process of this manuscript itself is a wonderful path of knowledge dissemination. After digitization, we are able to open these precious documents, which are the only ones left in the world, to the public for free, establishing a new way of knowledge sharing."