Words within Words: Layout Strategies in some Glossed Manuscripts of the Iliad

The contribution investigates a small group of manuscripts of Homer’s Iliad which present—as is normal in the Middle Byzantine period—the commentary arranged as a ‘frame’ around the central text, and in particular along its three ‘free’ sides. The application of a highly detailed analysis protocol to an individual book, endowed with particularly heavy annotation, makes it possible to identify the ways in which the scribe tackled the problem of synchronising the two bodies of text and then making the necessary adjustments between individual glosses and the corresponding passages of text through the use of various linkage mechanisms, such as symbols, numbers, or lemmata that reiterate the opening words of the glossed text.