Palatini Graeci - The Greek Manuscripts of the Bibliotheca Palatina

The total of approximately 2,700 manuscripts of the Bibliotheca Palatina, which are still kept in the vaults of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV), include almost 400 Greek codices produced between the 9th and the beginning of the 17th century.

The collection covers the entire spectrum of Greek manuscript culture, starting from the early Christian period to the early modern period. Represented are not only historical, philosophical, theological and jurisprudential texts, but above all literary works. The collection bears lasting witness to Greek culture from the classical to the Byzantine period.

The surviving textual witnesses of classical authors such as Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles or Euripides prove that these works were copied and reproduced again and again in the Middle Ages in order to preserve the heritage of antiquity. Scholars and philologists from the time of humanism, who contributed with their work to the fact that from that time onwards Greek - alongside Latin - held a natural place in the canon of science, are also to be found with many of their texts among the Greek manuscripts of the Bibliotheca Palatina. This is not least evidence that there was a great scholarly interest in Greek texts and Greek culture in Heidelberg in the 16th and early 17th centuries.

The digitisation and cataloguing project of the Palatini graeci, financed by the Polonsky Foundation, aims to secure the knowledge of this part of the European manuscript heritage for future generations and to make it usable without access restrictions.

• Cataloguing Guidelines
• Basic information on the cooperation project between the Universities of Cambridge and Heidelberg