Un lettore armeno di Gregorio di Nazianzo in un manoscritto greco di Gerusalemme (Hierosol. S. Sepulcri 29)

This contribution concerns the manuscript Hierosol. S. Sepulcri 29 (= Taphou 29: XIIXIII saec.), a Greek hagiographical-homiletic codex that is little studied and which is preserved in the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem. An analytical description is provided that clarifies the manner of its production and distinguishes the various hands of the Greek scribes — amongst whom figures an otherwise unknown Leo deacon of Nyssa — thereby adding this codex to the dossier of medieval Greek manuscripts produced in southern Anatolia. This article focusses above all, however, on the Armenian version of Or. 38 of Gregory of Nazianzus, which an anonymous medieval reader transcribed during the 13th century on the margin of the Greek text on fols. 43r-53r. We analyse here both the Armenian text and its script. The Armenian text corresponds to the ancient translation that is believed to have been made towards the end of the 5th century, which is transmitted by numerous codices, but was here modified by the 13th-century Armenian annotator at various points so as to make it better correspond to the Greek text that he had in front of him. Furthermore, the Armenian script he makes use of gradually passes from the formal bookhand minuscule (bolorgir), which is used initially, to the Armenian cursive (šłagir), which is also attested in another Greek manuscript where the same hand seems to have added the Armenian translation of a Byzantine poem (Vat. gr. 1445, fol. 2r). In fact, šłagir is a script-type which was hitherto scarcely documented in its medieval phase and is in any case little attested or noted so early in the context of book production or para-literary texts. The testimony of Taphou 29 is especially interesting because, among other things, it confirms the reconstruction of the evolution of medieval Armenian handwriting proposed by scholars such as Hrač‘eay Ačaṙean and Yakovbos Tašean. Between the end of the 19th and the early decades of the 20th century, in fact, these illustrious scholars had already suggested that Armenian cursive (šáagir) derived directly from the calligraphic minuscule (bolorgir), rather than from the later «notary script» (notrgir) that the communis opinio has instead considered an intermediary between the two.