My PhD project aims to write a history of Codex Vaticanus, currently seen as the most important manuscript for reconstructing the Greek text of the New Testament. Known from the sixteenth century onwards, the manuscript’s importance was not recognised until the nineteenth century. Only since then, its value was appreciated and eventually it became foundational for the Modern Critical Text. Hence a story is to be discovered and told: the transforming perceptions of Codex Vaticanus through the centuries.
I plan to uncover and reconstruct this intriguing history by approaching the historical data on the usage of the manuscript digitally. The prime data are the critical editions of the Greek New Testament, especially their critical apparatus. Other traces of the manuscript, in monographs, articles, archives, or other studies, will also be mapped. The prospective results should elucidate the scholarly networks and the intellectual history of the past five centuries, and can serve as a model for studying the reception history of any significant manuscript of the New Testament or of other classical works.
