Barillari Vito, Gli Sticheraria Crypt. Ε.α.II e Crypt. Ε.α.V. Sulla datazione e localizzazione dei codici

Barillari Vito, 

«Gli Sticheraria Crypt. Ε.α.II e Crypt. Ε.α.V. Sulla datazione e localizzazione dei codici», Bollettino della Badia Greca di Grottaferrata (BBGG), terza serie, n. 8 (2011), p. 5-50. 

2011

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Summary

The Sticheraria Crypt. Ε.α. II and Crypt. Ε.α. V, preserved at the National Library of the Abbey of Grottaferrata, are two important Byzantine musical manuscripts well-known to musicologists and the scientific community. They pass on a rich hymnographic repertoire, significant not only for the study and the reconstruction of the melodic songs in them, transmitted in Middle Byzantine musical notation, but also for understanding their peculiar and characteristic liturgical offices. In fact, these two sources collect a total of 1202 compositions. Crypt. Ε.α. II contains 746 stichera idiomela of the Menaion for all months of the Byzantine calendar. Crypt. Ε.α. V has 456 stichera idiomela and prosomoia of the Triodion-Pentekostarion for Lent and the season of Easter, some of which are in the kalophonic style. Besides several folios that are not a part of the codicological structure of these two original codices (sixteen palimpsest folios in Crypt. Ε.α. V; thirtysix fully-copied folios plus another nineteen that were partially integrated into Crypt. Ε.α. II by the renowned copyist and restorer John Rhosos of Crete), these two Sticheraria were both written by a single scribe. According to the intuition of musicologists Oliver Strunk and Jørgen Raasted, the hand can be identified as that of Hieromonk Symeon “Rakendytes” of Grottaferrata who, in 1288/89, completed and signed the manuscript Florence, Laur. Ashburamensis 64. In this study, adapted from the author’s dissertation in Musicology at the University of Pavia (Cremona, April 28, 2010), the veracity of this attribution is demostrated. The author therefore proposes a more precise and plausible definition of the current chronological data. Furthermore, this research has also led to an acknowledgment of the anonymous scribe who rewrote the palimpsest folios contained in Crypt. Ε.α. V (ff. 1r-16v), Crypt. A.β. XI (1r-4v, 190r-192v) and in the Psaltikon-Kontakarion Crypt. E.β. VII, codices likely datable to around the middle of the 13th century and located in Grottaferrata.