The critical text of the tragedies of Aeschylus is essentially stable, founding its constitutio on the authority of a few witnesses long identified by critics: the famous Mediceus, MS. Laur. Plut. 32.9, of the 10th century, and the 'editions' of the palaeologan scholar Demetrius Triclinius, namely MSS. Laur. Plut. 31.8, Marc. gr. Z. 616 and the so-called Aeschylus Farnese Neap. II F 31, the 'final edition' by Triclinius through which the text of Aeschylus, provided with a restored cholometry, an erudite commentary, and a characteristic lay-out, passed into Humanism and, hence, into printed editions. The importance of this handful of witnesses has ended up obscuring the numerous other Aeschylus' manuscripts that have come down to us: there are about 140 manuscripts, dating back by the 16th century and currently kept in the main libraries of Italy, the Vatican and Europe. The project that we intend to present aims at the scientific cataloguing, according to coherent models shared by the scientific community, of all the codicological units containing portions of the Aeschylus' plays, in order to provide for each of them a correct palaeographic, material and historical-cultural collocation. The analytical study of the manuscripts, in which particular attention will be devoted to the identification of the hands of the copyists, the readers and the owners, aims at reconstructing the itineraries of the fortune of Aeschylus from Byzantium to Renaissance Europe, among schools, scholarly milieux, professional copy ateliers, in which Aeschylus, and more generally the classical tradition, was collected and renewed. The catalog of Aeschylus' manuscripts, which is part of the activities promoted by the Comitato Classici (Classics Committee) of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, will be supported by more punctual philological and literary studies, aimed at illustrating with particular attention specific moments of this long history.
Despite the renewed scholarly interest in Aeschylus' tragedies (as shown, for instance, by the studies of West 1990 and 1998, and Smith 1993 and 2009 and by the ambitious project of a new critical edition of the entire Aeschylaean production promoted by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei: see Medda 2017, Cavallo - Medaglia 2019 and Miralles - Citti - Lomiento 2019) and in their reception (Kuto Kennedy 2018), the only complete account of the Aeschylaean manuscripts still remains the works published in 1933 by Smyth and in 1943 by Turyn. However, both of the scholars provided each codex only with a small number of descriptive elements, absolutely inadequate for the contemporary catalographic standards. The lack of a complete and up-to-date catalogue based on modern catalographic criteria, in spite of some articles dedicated to individual codices, has not been fulfilled yet. This has meant that most data regarding the material features of Aeschylaean manuscripts are unavailable to scholars. Even though a few manuscripts that are particularly relevant for the constitutio textus have been deeply analyzed, the majority of the so-called codices descripti are still neglected both from a textual and a material (and palaeographical as well) point of view, even now when scientific trend lines have shown the importance of every single manuscript in outlining the circulation of an author.
For this reason, the present project aims to bring forth an accurate survey of all the Aeschylean manuscripts produced between the 10th and the 16th century, in order to satisfy the need of a detailed description for each item according to current cataloguing standards. Furthermore, this new tool would open up the possibility of integrating the codicological and palaeographic data with the acquaintances concerning social, historical and cultural relations which are reflected both in the movements of manuscripts and in the prosopography of the individuals involved in the production and circulation of these books, and in the deployment of the text.
In addition to the review of data already available in the scholarly bibliography, the catalogue would provide new evidence concerning the codicological aspects of the manuscripts, paying close attention to those elements such the quire structure, the layout of the page (whose importance has already been pointed out by Proietti 2018, regarding the codices included in her dissertation) and the recognition of watermarks (for paper manuscripts, obviously).
Moreover, with regard to the palaeographic analysis, the observation of the handwriting displayed by various copyists involved in the transmission of Aeschylus' works within the 10th and 16th century would provide an insight on writing trends in the Aeschylean manuscripts. So far, the cultural and written history of Aeschylus' plays has almost exclusively been associated with few leading figures, above all the byzantine scholars Demetrius Triclinius and Thomas Magister (Bianconi 2005). A new palaeographic recognition of the different hands involved in the manuscript tradition would increase our knowledge about the circulation of these texts, hopefully leading to new identifications of readers, possessors and scribes who worked on them, especially in the Renaissance. Thus, it would also shed new light on the variety of places and contexts that eventually ensured the transmission of the tragedies.
Together with the codicological and palaeographic evaluation, a deeper investigation would be offered on textual and paratextual evidence supplied by the manuscripts. The detection and accurate description of elements such as the differences among the titles, the order and the distribution of the tragedies among the manuscripts over the time, the presence and the disposition of additional devices such as scholia, book epigrams and subscriptions, will lead to a better understanding of Aeschylus' reception from a diachronic point of view.
The analysis and organisation of these findings could set new basis for future studies, aimed at understanding the changes and evolutions across the production of Aeschylean manuscripts over the centuries (for instance, which tragedies circulated and where, in which order, who was interested in reading and, above all, in copying Aeschylus' tragedies for both themselves or others, etc.).
Such a catalogue, with its focus on the relationship between the material characteristics and the textual content of the Aeschylaean codices, will provide not only palaeographers and codicologists, but also scholars of other fields (philologists, historians of reception, cultural historians, specialists in Renaissance humanism etc.) with an up-to-date tool aimed at exploring the manuscript tradition of Aeschylus' tragedies from the 10th to the 16th century.