Sylvester Syropoulos’ Wandering Notes

Abstract Aristotle’s Organon has been passed down to us in around one hundred fifty Byzantine manuscripts datable from the ninth to the sixteenth century. Most of these manuscripts contain numerous layers of annotations that they accumulated over centuries. The ‘secondary layers’ mainly consist in additions, subtractions, and replacements of the content of the ‘primary layers’. The first layer in Reg. gr . 116 was made by a group of anonymous scribes by the end of the thirteenth century. A set of secondary layers were added by subsequent users in the fourteenth and fifteenth century. The most relevant secondary layer in Reg. gr . 116 is that made by the Byzantine official Sylvester Syropoulos in the 1420s, most probably in Constantinople. Syropoulos added numerous exegetical notes in the margins and between the lines of the core text written by the scribes of the unit. Furthermore, when he did not find enough space in the original folios, he created new ones on which he could add the exegetical notes. Later, he inserted them in the pertinent place in the original codicological unit. The present article puts forward the hypothesis that one of the folios Syropoulos created to enrich the thirteenth century unit is the current folio 2 r–v in Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, D 54 sup. (late thirteenth century). The proposed hypothesis will be validated through evidence gathered from an approach that integrates different disciplines from the humanities: codicology, palaeography, and philology. Further support to our hypothesis is provided by material analysis: using a combination of UV -vis- NIR reflectography and X-ray fluorescence ( XRF ) spectroscopy, the black and red inks of Ambr . D 54 sup., f. 2 r–v and Reg. gr . 116 were investigated and compared. The results also give insight into the inks used in Byzantium in the fifteenth century. This research displays an example of how different methodologies from humanities and natural sciences can be combined to form a holistic approach to manuscript studies.