Evangeliario di Messina – edition by Alessandra Cocco

Evangeliario di Messina. Analisi Paleografica ff 35r-35v 
Edition by Alessandra Cocco <alessandracocco@hotmail.it>

About the edition: The manuscript on which I focus on is an evangeliary. Evangelary  is the English term for the Latin “evangeliarium “ , a liturgical book containing only those portions of the four gospels which are read during Mass or in the public offices of the Church. It is therefore distinguished from a gospel book, which contains the full texts of the gospels, without references in the main text to the passages or to the liturgical use.  An independent production of books during the Norman kingdom in Sicily is probably demostrated by a group of illuminated manuscripts preserved in several european libraries, and that manuscript is one of the few surviving manuscripts of the Norman Sicilian period that are still preserved in Sicily. Many students have attempted to trace the existence of  this independent production of books written in Carolingian script during the Norman kingdom in Sicily, and they have identified a group of illuminated manuscript which were probably written in Sicily at the time of the Norman court.  The Evangeliary of Messina is one of the very few volumes of this group that until today have not been examined in detail.

Aim of the digital edition: The project is aimed to highlights the most important paleographical feature of the manuscript script through an immediate and intuitive visual layout easily to understand and to use. This work is just a preliminary prototype useful to see if the possibility of the visualisation and analysis of paleographical feature in detail could help the scholars in the work of compare scripts. In fact a second step it might be to create an advanced prototype that make a straight comparison between the paleographical features of two different manuscript, thanks to this intuitive visual layout it could be possible to have on one page the different realization of the same paleographical aspect in two or three different manuscript.   Go beyond the practical aspect of the prototype, another important outcome of this project is the possibility for the prototype to be useful in a deeper analysis of the manuscript. In fact, on the basis of palaeographical features and the work analysis of the beginning and development of Latin culture and writing in Sicily during the kingdom of Altavilla’s family, it is possible to suppose that the manufacture of this manuscript had place in the cultural palace’s milieu during the half of the XII Century, In that period, in Sicily  European and Muslim artistic and writing culture were mixed up with North Italian and French influences.

See the edition prototype (1)
See the edition prototype (2)