Acts of Archelaus (Acta Archelai)

...find in Traube’s manuscript, then only one leaf is missing; but if it also contained the appendix (and there is no doubt that the appendix was already present in the very old source of CM referring to Montecassino manuscript 371, see p. XVIII, note 2), then two leaves of the original codex have not come down to us; but in the latter case, the last quire would likely not have been a quaternio plus two leaves, but a quinio five-sheet quire.

Most likely, the Hegemonius-subscription enabled a fourteenth-century scribe to add the note vel manes scripta ab emogenio (?) or Manes written by Emogenius (?) presbyter to the heading written on p. 66 in red ink, Disputatio archelay et manychei Disputation of Archelaus and Manes. Admittedly, the reading emogenio is not absolutely certain; one might, if a stroke after the g is not a mistake, perhaps read emogrenio, and recognize na instead of ni; however, stronger reasons speak for the reading emogenio, a form that most likely arose through a kind of metathesis from egemonio. Reifferscheid's reading, anonymo, is certainly wrong. It would also be strange if a scribe, regarding a disputation whose authenticity and author he had no reason to investigate from the outset, had retrospectively designated the author as anonymous; rather, one may assume that precisely because he saw the Hegemonius-subscription on fol. 114v, he wanted to complete the heading by indicating the author (or perhaps, in his view, only the stenographer).

As it seems, seven scribes were active in the second part of the codex. The first wrote fol. 66–78v, line 16 (p. 1–33, 28 of my edition). On 78v, line 16–89v, the end of a quire (= p. 33, 28–53, 4), we recognize the hand of a second scribe, who also used a different ink; on the last pages, he stretched his writing so that the text assigned to him would reach the end of the quire. The third scribe wrote 90 (= p. 53, 4–29); the fourth 90v, lines 1–18 (= p. 53, 29–54, 14) with a thin, brown, faded ink; the fifth 90v, lines 18–28 (= p. 54, 14–24); the sixth 91 (= p. 54, 24–55, 22) in somewhat cramped writing, and the seventh 91v to the end. This change of scribes, recognizable already by external signs, can be determined with certainty if one attentively follows the orthography and abbreviation method of each. Possibly the third or the fifth scribe is identical to the last; one can also consider assuming multiple hands for fol. 91–113v, as the nature of the forms and abbreviations varies here. However, the greater probability speaks against these possibilities and for the assumption of seven scribes.

The abbreviations are those customary in the Beneventan script circle of that...