Jeremy Schott: Reading Ecclesiastical History in Byzantium: Towards an Edition and Study of the Scholia in Laur. Plut.70.7

In the course of creating a new translation of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History,I returned to some of the most important manuscript witnesses to the text. One early 10th-century manuscript, currently held in the Laurentian library in Florence but likely originating in a Byzantine monastic context, contains the text of Eusebius along with that of Socrates Scholasticus. The manuscript is unique among those of the HEfor its extensive scholia. The scholia are additionally significant because they represent at least three different periods of commentary on the text: a first stratum produced at the same time as the manuscript, a second stratum replete with anti-Origenist polemics, and a third layer that polemicizes against the second. By studying the way in which these scholia interact with the main text as well aswith each other, I will shed light on the hermeneutics of Byzantine readings of a specific patristic text and show how Byzantine readers used the specific materiality of the manuscript to embody and contest tradition.