Margherita Losacco

Università degli Studi di Bari

Books in Byzantium: in search of libraries

2006-2007

Losacco (Bari, 1974) is lecturer in Classical Philology at the University of Bari. She graduated in 1996 in Classical Philology; in 1998 she obtained the Diploma of Greek Palaeographer at the "Scuola Vaticana di Paleografia"; in 2000 she passed the final exam for her Ph.D. in Classical Philology at the University of Bari. In 2003 she joined the European project «Rinascimento virtuale» for the cataloguing of Greek palimpsests in European libraries. Her scientific activity has regarded the history of transmission of classical and Byzantine Greek texts, from the Middle Ages up to modern times, and their manuscript tradition. She concentrated her work mostly on the huge corpus of the Byzantine patriarch Photius. Among her publications are the volume Antonio Catiforo e Giovanni Veludo interpreti di Fozio (Edizioni Dedalo, Bari, 2003) and articles on topics related to the history of transmission of Byzantine texts in international journals, such as the Revue d'histoire des textes, Thesaurismata, Quaderni di Storia. At present she is working on a comprehensive study of the Greek manuscript collection preserved in the Archiginnasio Library in Bologna, and doing extensive research about manuscripts (from the 11th to the 15th centuries) containing excerpts of Photius' so-called Library. At the Italian Academy she will be focusing her research on the history of books, libraries, and culture in the Byzantine age, starting from a significant case-study such the Byzantine tradition of Photius' Library.