Avis de soutenance - doctorat - Margherita MATERA

The subject of this thesis is the palimpsest manuscript Parisinus greacus 1330, kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) and coming from the collection of Jean Baptiste Colbert (Bibliotheca Colbertina). The manuscript, defective at the beginning and the end, consists, today, of 188 folios entirely palimpsests, rewritten on parchments coming from at least four old codices from different periods. The oldest inferior textual unit (9 folios) is written in a script called "maiuscola biblical", datable between the 5th and 6th centuries, and transmits to us an unpublished commentary on Aristotelian logic, in the form of branched diagrams. The largest unit (139 folios) gives us a large part of the Corpus Dionysiacum, written in ogival capital letters and dated between the 8th and the beginning of the 9th century. The Palimpsest preserves two other ancient textual units, which are not the subject of our research. Recently, due to the texts transmitted by the antiquiores units, the manuscript has been the subject of a high-tech photographic study within the framework of the international research project PALimpsestorum Aetatis Mediae EDitiones Et Studia (PALAMEDES). The photographic material developed by the PALAMEDES project was made available to me during this research. The thesis tries to demonstrate how the contribution of new technologies, applied to the study of palimpsests, was essential to the analysis carried out during the years of doctoral research and, especially for the unit containing the Corpus of the writings of the du Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, these tools made it possible to arrive at an almost complete transcription of the Dionysian folios. The study did not neglect the analysis of the upper manuscript and its history, on the contrary, certain documentary investigations have made it possible to trace the provenance of the Parisinus: it was certainly bought in Smyrna in 1680. About the ancient Dionysian unit, we tried, based on codicological data, to reconstruct the original aspect of the manuscripts by managing to restore, in part, the structure of the old codex. Through a paleographic comparison with other manuscripts, it has been possible to demonstrate that the Dionysian parchments are older than the famous Par. gr. 437, from the year 827, until now considered to be the oldest manuscript witness of the Corpus Dionysiacum tradition. The transcription of the Dionysian folios then made it possible to establish the relationship between the palimpsest and other witnesses of the manuscript tradition; moreover, and to demonstrate the goodness of the texts transmitted and the need to consider the Parisinus, a manuscript until now not carefully studied by the editors of the Corpus, as an important witness of the pseudo-Areopagitic manuscript tradition. The diagrams of logic, which convey an unpublished commentary mainly based on the Early Analytics, had already been analyzed and transcribed, with the collaboration of the writer, within the framework of the PALAMEDES project already mentioned. During the doctoral research, only 2 of the 9 leaves of the unit were analyzed (ff. 16 and 18) and for these, we offer integrations to the transcriptions, with a list of some of the loci paralleli. An attempt has been made, even briefly, to explain what was the original purpose of the diagrams: the form of the diagrams and their content would suggest that the parchments were made by a professor of philosophy for the preparation of an "introductory" lesson which was to take place hold in one of the philosophical schools of late antiquity (possibly Alexandria). The codicological unit containing the diagrams of logic is presented in this thesis in the form of an excursus and represents a preliminary study which, it is hoped, can serve as a basis for future research carried out by specialists in the manuscript tradition of philosophical commentaries of logic.