Greek mss at the British Library

I have been hunting around to see which Greek manuscripts at the British Library it might be interesting to get digitised.  It is remarkably difficult to find out.

The BL catalogue is online; but it is largely useless because there is no way to restrict results to Greek mss only.  So a search for Chrysostom — every collection must have these — is pointless, because most of the results will be Latin manuscripts of translations.  This is really quite frustrating.  So far I have managed to find only a handful of mss which I might put forward.

One possible source of information would be Henri Omont, ‘Notes sur les manuscrits grecs du British Museum’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, 45 (1884), 314-50, 584 (p. 335).  This is online here.  Maybe this will list some interesting volumes, if it ever downloads!

UPDATE: Indeed it does.  After a survey of the main collections, it lists the interesting previous owners and what they owned.  I need to digest this down into a list of suggestions.

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2 thoughts on “Greek mss at the British Library

  1. “The BL catalogue is online; but it is largely useless because there is no way to restrict results to Greek mss only.”

    How about going to the catalogue
    http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/manuscripts/DESC0000.asp
    and searching on the phrase “in Greek”. Such a search produces over 1200 hits (including MSS that *contain* some Greek, but are not wholly in Greek).

  2. Thanks for the suggestion. But as you see it doesn’t give you lists of Greek mss; it gives you lists of personal papers of 18th century dignitaries that happen to contain a bit of Greek. I tried a number of keywords on Greek and Graece and so on, but eventually gave up.

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