Compilation methods of the Excerpta Constantiniana revisited: From one compilator to the three-stage model of teamwork

Németh, András (2017) Compilation methods of the Excerpta Constantiniana revisited: From one compilator to the three-stage model of teamwork. Byzantinoslavica, 75 (1-2). pp. 265-290. ISSN 0007-7712

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Abstract

This paper discusses the actual method of compilation of the Excerpta Constantinia under Byzantine courtly supervision in the tenth century. It demonstrates that scholars who edited historical fragments of classical and Byzantine historians from the Excerpta have projected their own philological practices, changing over the centuries, onto the imperial employees’ actual activity of excerpting. From the view of one compilator, they gradually arrived at the concensus seeing a teamwork of expert participants and scribes who processed the historical texts in two consecutive stages. In the first stage, participants classified short coherent sections of texts, each coresponding to one of the fifty-three preselected subjects, by marking them in the manuscripts including complete texts. In the second stage, scribes copied the sections already ascribed to the the same subject heading into separate manuscripts, distinguished by subject, and in groups of authors. Based on the surviving evidence of the Excerpta’s manuscripts, this paper describes a range of phenomena that do not fi t the two-stage model and ascribes them to an additional draft stage. In addition, it extends the chronological framework of the Excerpta project from the early 940s to the 970s and 980s when the Suda’s compilers used the Excerpta’s drafts.

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