Untersuchungen zu den griechischen Palimpsesten der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek

Parchment, the writing material prepared from animal skin in late antiquity and in the medieval period, has been costly at all times, and therefore texts that had become expendable for any reason were removed by being scraped or washed off to recover the valuable material for a second use in writing new texts. Parchments reused in this way are called palimpsests nowadays. The present book offers new results from the study of the Greek palimpsests preserved in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. It provides an overview of the current state of research on the lower (i.e. original) layers of text in five codices Vindobonenses: Vind. Hist. gr. 10, Vind. Hist. gr. 73, Vind. Phil. gr. 158, Vind. Phil. gr. 286 and Vind. Iur. gr. 18. However, the recovery of the lower texts through various methods is by no means final and continues to improve. Given the interim state of the readability of these texts, which is after all a prerequisite to further work, this book aims to provide preliminary information about the manuscript fragments and text witnesses present in the lower palimpsest layers. Thus, this data is now made available to experts, e. g. paleographers or philologists specialised in the authors and texts transmitted in these palimpsests, in order to enable them to peruse and analyse the new material, e. g. while preparing a new text edition or while studying other palimpsests in libraries worldwide.