Saint Isidore of Pelusium is one of the eminent figures of Christianity in Egypt. Born after 350 in Pelusium (Pleiades 727192) at the eastern fringe of the Nile Delta, he had studied rhetorics in Alexandria and later worked as a teacher of rhetorics and presbyter in his hometown. The last decades of his life, which coincide with the lifespan of Cyril of Alexandria and Theodoret of Antioch, he lived as an ascetic in the vicity of Pelusium, and from his solitude entertained a vast network of correspondents. Shortly after his death around 440, a great number of his letters were reportedly edited as a collection, and from then until the early modern period have enjoyed tremendous popularity due to their exegetical and socio-historical interest. The corpus of Isidore’s Letters (CPG 5557), as we have it now, is comprised of 1999 individual letters addressed to a hundreds of recipients, laymen and members of the clergy alike.

Isidore’s Letters cover a great variety of subjects. One recurring aspect is the exegesis of verses from Holy Scripture. In his 2020 book Schriftauslegung und Bildgebrauch bei Isidor von Pelusium, Stefan Berkmüller deals with the exegetical substance of this epistolary corpus which, for a large part, is still lacking a critical edition. The last complete edition in the Patrologia Graeca (vol. 78, col. 177–1645, a reprint from Morel’s 1638 edition [Google Books] with some variants from select manuscripts) follows a numbering scheme which supposes the partition of the corpus into five “books”, which was introduced by the printed editions. Contrary to this partition, the manuscripts attest to a consecutive numbering scheme from 1–2000, as established by Pierre Évieux,¹ who later published a critical edition of the letters 1213–2000 for the Sources Chrétiennes in three volumes (SC 422 [1997]; 454 [2000]; 586 [2017]: published posthumously by Nicolas Vinel). As SC 422/454/586 only in part replace PG 78, the two editions and their numbering schemes, a concordance of which is found at the end of Évieux’s article, still have to be used in conjunction.

Outline of the Manuscript Transmission

As with any popular text, the manuscript transmission of Isidore’s Letters is a vexed subject. Évieux distinguished between two types of manuscripts which he called “collections” and “recueils”. The latter differ from the former in that they do not transmit the whole corpus but only a selection (for example, dogmatic, ascetic, or exegetical letters). The recueils also employ their own numbering schemes which differs from that of the collections. More recently, Madalina Toca gave an exemplary discussion of some manuscripts, taking codicological features into account.² Toca also rightfully pointed out that the estimate by Évieux about the total number of manuscripts (about 450, including excerpts in catenae and florilegia) is not definitive, and that new discoveries in the margins of manuscript will constantly raise this number.

To the list of petits recueils (in Évieux’s terms, manuscripts transmitting less than 100 letters, selected according to a common theme) can now be added Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, San Marco 696 = Rahlfs 9016 (olim 1052) = Diktyon 16193, a manuscript with Theodoret’s Commentary on the Psalms (CPG 6202) and Catenae in Odas (CPG C46).

A Brief Description of Rahlfs 9016 (olim 1052)

San Marco 696 is a manuscript with commentaries on the Psalms and Odes written by a single scribe, and to this day is fully intact. It consists of 39 quires whose numbers are found on the first and last folio of each quire in the lower inner corner, sometimes cut of by the final trimming of the book. All quires are quaternions except for the second-to-last (38 = ληʹ) which is a quinio. The whole manuscript was written by one scribe in a very economical manner, using black ink, with next to no decoration other than unassuming decorative bands at the beginning and end of the Protheoria in Psalmos (f. 1r, f. 2v), the Psalms (f. 3r, f. 284v), and the Odes (f. 284v, f. 315v). This economy of the scribe (or perhaps rather that of the commissioner and patron of the book) can be observed in the use of the writing space as well: Though word division is attempted, there are almost no empty spaces or enlarged initials to separate the biblical text from the commentary. The biblical text is only marked with "diplai" in the left margin. Mise en page, as a visual aid, is only used at the beginning of each psalm, where the first part of the commentary and the first biblical quotation after the titulus are off-set with a new line and the initial letter rubricated and written in ecthesis. Also, for the psalms, the titulus is written in red ink, with the psalm number in the outer margin, all apparently by the same scribe. A peculiar mannerism of this scribe is the way they treated words with αυ and ευ diphthongs before vowel at the end of a line: Ιnstead of κατασκε|υάσθη, the scribe wrote κατασκε|βάσθη with a distinct β. This occurs 16 times throughout the Theodoret text.

The script was dated to the 11^th century by Rostagno and Festa,³ and the majority of scholars kept this dating.⁴ Georgi Parpulov however dated this manuscript to the 12^th century.⁵ Until more evidence comes to light, I cannot refute nor confirm these assertions. On the last folio there are some notes which could be part of a subscription or colophon, but in the microfilm they are impossible to decipher. Another remarkable thing is the occurrence of a book epigram at the end of the Psalms and Odes commentary, respectively: The scribe finished both these texts with the dodecasyllable πλήρωμα πάντων τῶν καλῶν χ(ριστὸ)ς πέλει (DBBE type 1978).

While the origin of the manuscript is uncertain, its provenance is well accounted for from the 14^th century. It was acquired by the famous collector Niccolò Niccoli (1365–1437),⁶ and it is tempting to assign to him the pilcrows (pieds-de-mouche) and the Latin marginalia on ff. 4r–5v of the manuscript.⁷ The manuscript was bequeathed to the convent of San Marco after Niccoli’s death, and remained there until 1885 when the convent’s library was integrated into the Laurenziana.

Theodoretus e patribus auctus: The Marginalia in Ra 9016

Like some other manuscripts with Theodoret’s Commentary on the Psalms, San Marco 696 is furnished with marginal notes which were written by the original scribe of the manuscript, as can be seen from the style as well as the line division προσαγορέ|βονται on f. 32r (see above on this mannerism). 

Florence, BML, San Marco 696, f. 32r (detail)

© Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana

The marginal notes (80 in total) span across most of the Psalms from 1 through 150 and contain excerpts from other Fathers of varying length, ranging from a few words to whole margins (top, outer and bottom) covered by them. In the beginning, the text of these margins is sometimes cut off, owing either to poor planning by the scribe or a second trimming. For the most part, the excerpts are easy to read, and they are always preceded by an authorial attribution. For 67 of these 80 excerpts, this author is Isidore of Pelusium. The other 13 excerpts are attributed to Athanasius (Oratio I contra Arianos, CPG 2093), John Chrysostom (“κατὰ Ἰουδαίων”, apparently spurious) and Gregory of Nyssa (Liber de cognitione Dei, CPG 3223 [spurium]), and their unifying feature is that they appear in Euthymius Zigabenus’ Panoplia dogmatica ad Alexium Comnenum (PG 130) which was compiled shortly after 1099.⁸ If it is true that the scribe quoted from the Panoplia dogmatica, this would confirm a dating to the 12^th century.

To better determine the sources of the marginal notes, more intricate study is required than can be expected from a blog post. As a reference, and to further illustrate the role of San Marco 696 as a witness to Isidore’s Letters, the following table lists the individual notes with their authorial attribution. For Isidore, the exact location of the excerpt as well as the number (as found in the manuscript) is listed.

It is important to keep in mind that the Isidoreana are all substantial excerpts, indeed always comprising the whole letter. For this reason, San Marco 696 = Rahlfs 9016 (olim 1052) can be regarded as a thematic selection of Isidore’s letters concerning the exegesis of the Book of Psalms. The misalignment of the numbers is evident: They only agree in note 10 for ep. 2, and from there on out Ra 9016 always has a lower number. The highest of these is ͵αχνϛ = 1656 (i. e. ep. 1998) in note 61. While we cannot judge the manuscript’s relation to the other Isideorean manuscripts, it emerges as an interesting witness to the reception of the Pelusian father during the Comnenan period.

Note (3 March 2025): Stefan Berkmüller has kindly pointed out a few minor errors in this blogpost via email which I have corrected.