Per la storia di un manoscritto armeno in Inghilterra (London, Wellcome Library, ms. 16586)

The digital reproductions of manuscripts that are available online in constantly increasing numbers form an extraordinary resource for advancing the study of every culture’s written heritage. In our case, thanks to the image of the colophon and final note of an Armenian manuscript (a hymnal that belongs to the collection of the Wellcome Library of London, ms. 16586), it is possible to obtain additional information regarding its scribe and the history of the codex itself. The final note in particular—as regards its date, handwriting, contents, and the characteristic purple colour of the ink in which it was written—belongs without a shadow of a doubt to the hand of the vardapet Łewond Pʽirłalēmean (1830–1891), who was a pioneer of the study of the colophons of the Armenian manuscripts that he copied in the course of his numerous journeys in which he visited the Armenian monasteries of the Ottoman empire. Therefore, another of the manuscripts that he saw in the monastic libraries of historic Armenia, many of which were subsequently scattered or destroyed, has been saved. Thanks to the help of online digital reproductions, it is to be hoped that other codices that he examined and to which he added his notes will be discovered in the near future.