Thornton Academy Postscripts Alumni Magazine Spring 2013 | Page 8

In t h e C lassr o o m

Jennifer Scontras ’11: Cracking the code
of a medieval manuscript

In Thornton Academy’s Homeric Greek class, Jennifer Scontras ‘11 shows students a high-resolution photo of the 10th
century A.D. manuscript known as Venetus B, housed in Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, on which she has conducted
research at Brandeis University.

Jennifer Scontras ’11, currently a student at Brandeis
University majoring in Neuroscience and Classics,
shared her medieval manuscript research with Nathaniel
Koonce’s Homeric Greek class. As a team member in
the ‘Homer Multitext Project,’ Scontras has taken part in
cracking the code of one of the earliest (10th century)
medieval manuscripts of Homer’s Iliad.
Faculty member Koonce said, “By sharing her work
with current students, Jennifer gave them an idea of
the sort of important work still happening in Classics.
Much of her talk explained the difficulty of deciphering
the various abbreviations and symbols which adorn and
sometimes replace the Greek text of the Iliad and the
editor’s commentary surrounding it.”
Scontras explained, “Up until recently, classicists didn’t
know much about these manuscripts because the
library would only let very few people look at them for a
couple of hours at a time so nobody could read through
it all thoroughly. A few years ago, Harvard went in and
took high resolution pictures of every page of every
manuscript so that classicists all around the world could
look at these precious documents for as long as they

Postscripts

•

8

want. At Brandeis, we are in charge of going through
the Venetus B. The main text is the plain old story of
the Iliad and it’s written fairly legibly. However, the real
challenge comes when we move on to reading the scholia
- the editor’s notes about the text. These are written in
a different hand and riddled with abbreviations and
shorthands that we have to decode by finding patterns
within the text and using logic. The shorthand was put
into the text in order to save room on the page because,
since they were writing on lamb skin, there’s only so much
space for notes. Though we’ve all gotten pretty good at
deducing what it should say, occasionally we can’t figure
something out and, in that case, our main focus is to
record what is physically on the page.”
Scontras added, “The end goal is to make the text as
accessible as possible to any and all classicists. There’s
still a lot to be done and I’m excited to be working on it
again this semester.”
If you would like to explore the beautiful, high resolution
images of these texts, go to: chs75.chs.harvard.edu/
manuscripts/index