For those who don’t know Clark Bates, he wrote his ThM thesis under my supervision on the origin of minuscule script. I learned a lot from his research. He has gone on to finish his PhD at the University of Birmingham (UK) on catena MSS. In the latest issue of The Byzantine Review, he has a substantive review of a new book on that subject. Here is how the review starts:
It is not very often that one has occasion to review a work that disrupts,challenges, and refutes one’s own earlier research and suppositions. Neither is it often that such disruption is well-received. Nina Sietis’s recentmonograph on the origin of the ‘Studite Minuscule’ has provided me withboth opportunities.
In this thoroughgoing and well-written book, Sietis offers readers an outline of the institution of the Studios Monastery andthe biography of its most influential abbot, Theodore, as well as a comprehensive analysis of the research related to the development of the literary minuscule script often associated with the same monastery and abbot. The historical and paleographical details of the first volume are accompaniedand amplified by a catalogue of Studite manuscripts in the second one. Because most researchers will probably engage with Volume I, I will devote most of my review to it but reserve some comments for the catalogue of Volume II.
Sietis’s book is in two volumes, the first of which is open access. But for those of us who can’t read Italian or can’t read it well, you will want to read Clark’s review to get a good sense of the book’s argument. I will be among those who need to update my lecture notes accordingly.
