Frammenti da recupero codicologico, dalle carte del card. Giovanni Mercati (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana)

This article deals with some parchment fragments that, rediscovered in all likelihood in the library of the chapter of the Cathedral of Milan, were sent in December 1920 by the then director of the library, Mgr. Marco Magistretti, to Giovanni Mercati, who at that time was the prefect of the Vatican Library. These fragments, which had been re-employed in the binding of a seventeenth-century printed volume, had been extracted from it in September 1920, when the printed book was discarded (perhaps because damaged and therefore deemed useless). Giovanni Mercati, after receiving them, seems not to have had an opportunity to study them in detail. The fragments come from a lost parchment witness of the unpublished commentary of Nicetas of Heraclea (XI-XII cent.) on the homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus (IV cent.), and they contain in particular a brief passage of the section of the commentary dealing with Or. 43 (the funeral oration for St Basil of Caesarea). The manuscript from which the fragments come had been copied in the «Salentine baroque style» script, and seems to date to the very last years of the fourteenth century or to the beginning of the fifteenth. In fact, it seems possible to identify in them the hand of the scribe Thomas, who was a hieromonk of the well-known monastery of St Nicholas at Casole, near Otranto: a scribe active between the very last years of the 1300s and the first decades of the 1400s, whose hand is known from the manuscripts Vaticanus graecus 1870 and Parisinus graecus 2558. The discovery of these fragments, therefore, has allowed us: 1) to reflect on the characteristics and aims of the manuscript production of Thomas of Casole; 2) to discuss afresh the spread in Salento, and more generally in southern Italy, of the commentary of Nicetas of Heraclea on the homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus and to discuss the type of «scholastic» use that was made of it in late medieval Salento; 3) to hypothesize within the monastery of St Nicholas at Casole still in the course of the 1400s – when it was bel ieved that this religious foundation was already long culturally moribund – a certain amount of teaching, which would seem to be attested also through the figure of another hieromonk and scribe somewhat later in date, viz. Nektarios (third quarter of the XV cent.). It is possible that the transcription made by Thomas of the lost manuscript whose small surviving fragments have been preserved in the Vatican Library amongst the papers of Giovanni Mercati for the last one hundred years – and which have now been assigned the call-number Vaticanus graecus 2672 fol. 2 – was also intended for this same activity of teaching.