Patterns of Source Survival

Chapter 3 describes how the extant Italo-Greek nomocanons survived from the medieval period to the modern day, noting two main vectors: the monastic Order of St Basil (concentrated in Sicily, Calabria, and Lucania), and the Renaissance book market in the Salento peninsula. It also considers the implications of these patterns of source survival for what kind of evidence has survived and what sort of conclusions we can draw from it. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, it explains how the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–1445) inspired Pope Eugenius IV to create the monastic Order of St Basil to provide an institutional structure to Byzantine-rite monasticism in southern Italy; this would play a pivotal role in supporting the remaining Italo-Greek monasteries and preserving their manuscript collections into the early modern period. The chapter then turns to the Salento peninsula, observing that families of secular Greek clergy (rather than monasteries) played the most important role in copying and preserving manuscripts in the region. During the Renaissance, the Salento became a popular region for scholarly book collectors to purchase manuscripts, bringing them to great Renaissance libraries such as the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. The chapter also looks at other ways that manuscripts survived, such as through the efforts of the seventeenth-century Russian monk Arsenii Sukhanov. For the most part, manuscripts that were not stored in Basilian monasteries or purchased from the Renaissance Salento have not been preserved.