‘Atticismo’, excerpta lessicografici e prassi didattiche in età paleologa

Abstract

The search for purity of language during the Palaeologan age has often been regarded as a revival of the Atticist movement of the second century AD. Students who had access to the higher education aimed at mastering this new form of Attic Greek: a large set of ancient authors deemed to be models of language and style served as repositories of lexical materials. Within this framework the need of school handbooks, dictionaries is quite understandable. In the first section of the paper I offer an overview of the multifarious typologies of scholarly texts largely used in the first Palaeologan age. Then, I focus more specifically on some miscellaneous excerpts merged into anthological manuscripts, by taking into account a largely overlooked series of grammatical and lexical annotations on Lucian. Differently from what is often stated in the catalogues, I show how the order of the items follows closely Lucian’s texts. These annotations could be the transcription of teachers’ notes and/or lecture notes taken during collective/private readings of texts.