——————————————————————————————————–—– JAHRBUCH DER ÖSTERREICHISCHEN BYZANTINISTIK, 70. Band/2020, 289–304 © by Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien DOI: 10.1553/joeb70S289 ——————————————————————————————————–—– C AROLINE M ACÉ a – P ATRICK A NDRIST b Understanding the Genesis of a Multi-Layered Byzantine Manuscript The Illuminated Copy of Elias of Crete’s Commentary on Gregory Nazianzen (Basel, UB, AN I 8) * ABSTRACT: It has been widely agreed that the manuscript Basel, UB, AN I 8, featuring the second part of Elias of Crete’s commentary to the “unread” homilies of Gregory Nazianzen, was decorated with an impressive set of full-page illuminations serving as frontispieces to each commentary in a second phase, sometime after the text and initial portraits had been copied. Karin Krause’s recent and well-documented article called for a re-examination of this book’s genetic history. The study here focuses on several of its most surprising features, offering a fresh look and a hopefully more plausible explanation for the origin and production process of these images. KEYWORDS: Byzantine Book Production, Book Illustration, Elias of Crete’s Commentary, Gregory Nazianzen’s Representa- tions, Christ Emmanuel INTRODUCTION Manuscripts are complex objects, requiring interdisciplinary approaches and drawing on different disciplines of scholarship, such as codicology, palaeography, philology, art history, and book histo- ry. This is especially the case with codex Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, AN I 8 (Diktyon 8896), a late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century manuscript containing the Greek text of nineteen orations by Gregory of Nazianzus with a commentary by Elias of Crete and sixteen full-page illustrations. In January 2013, Patrick Andrist, Karin Krause, and Caroline Macé began a collaborative project on this codex, employing a multifaceted approach. A palaeographer and codicologist by training, Patrick Andrist had been entrusted by the Universitätsbibliothek in Basel with the task of describ- ing the manuscript for the publication of its digital images on the e-codices platform; that descrip- tion was published in 2017 1 . Meanwhile, Karin Krause, an art historian specialising in Byzantine manuscript illumination, had contacted Caroline Macé to express interest in working together on the Basel manuscript, since Macé’s dissertation focused on the textual history of Gregory’s homi- lies 2 . The collaboration between the three of us therefore started naturally. The work took longer than expected, most of all because the puzzle pieces of evidence that we had assembled were very difficult to put together. In the end, because of different professional and time constraints, Patrick ————— a Caroline Macé: Akademie der Wissenschaften, Patristische Kommission, Friedländer Weg 11, D-37085 Göttingen; cmace@gwdg.de; Universität Hamburg, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Warburgstraße 26, D-20354 Ham- burg; caroline.mace@uni-hamburg.de b Patrick Andrist: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Evangelisch-Theologische Fakultät, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, D-80539 München; patrick.andrist@lmu.de; Université de Fribourg, Philologie classique; patrick.andrist@unifr.ch. * Much gratitude is owed to Richard Bishop and James Rumball for their careful revision of this article. 1 P. ANDRIST, Standardbeschreibung vom Codex Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, AN I 8: https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/de/ description/ubb/AN-I-0008/Andrist (published in 2017, accessed 14 Nov. 2020). 2 C. MACÉ, La tradition des discours de Grégoire de Nazianze. Édition critique du discours 27. Unpublished PhD thesis, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve 2002.