The Hexabiblos: the Humanist quest for the text

Since the publication of its editio princeps in 1540, the Hexabiblos of Constantinos Harmenopoulos attracted the attention of many legal humanists, including Cujas, Contius, Soarez de Ribeira, Falkenburg, and others. As was their practice, they wrote annotations, emendations and comments in the margins of their personal copies, often collating the printed text with other manuscripts they discovered in various libraries. Some of this precious evidence has been preserved in a set of seven copies now in the Advocates Library in Edinburgh. These copies were used in the 18th century by Otto Reitz, the scholar entrusted by Meerman with the preparation of a new edition of the Hexabiblos. The books were later sold at the auction of Meerman’s library in 1824. This late Byzantine source offers an illuminating example of the philological approach of the legal humanists, and of the process which, over the centuries, led from manuscript text to printed edition.