This book throws new light on an important selection of forty manuscripts from the Bodleian’s collections of medieval and renaissance Greek manuscripts. The introduction contains up-to-date evidence about the provenance of the collection and detailed descriptions of these codices. The book also includes integrated black and white illustrations of over forty selected folios.The Meerman Library was composed almost exclusively of manuscripts which had belonged to the Jesuits of Clermont in Paris . It was bought for the Bodleian from the collection of the Dutch bibliophile Gerard Meerman in 1824. Professor Palau traces them further back to several previous owners, including Guillaume Pellicier, French ambassador to Venice in the first half of the sixteenth century.This catalogue is an invaluable source of information on the transmission of Greek texts and an essential resource for scholars and students of Greek Literature and Palaeography.

What does writing Greek books mean at the height of the Cinquecento in Venice? The present volume provides fascinating insights into Greek-language book production at a time when printed books were already at a rather advanced stage of development with regards to requests, purchases and exchanges of books; copying and borrowing practices; relations among intellectuals and with institutions, and much more. Based on the investigation into selected institutional and private libraries – in particular the book collection of Gabriel Severos, guide of the Greek Confraternity in Venice – the authors present new pertinent evidence from Renaissance books and documents, discuss methodological questions, and propose innovative research perspectives for a sociocultural approach to book histories.

The contributions included in this volume deal with the indirect tradition of classical Greek texts in anthologies, lexica and scholia. The innovative approach taken consists in considering the indirect sources as texts worth studying in their own right, rather than as repositories of older, more important texts. The indirect tradition in scholarly literature is thus considered in terms of its broader historical and cultural implications.