The Codex 429 of
Ravenna’s
Classense Library, attributed to the half of the tenth century, is the most ancient medieval manuscript that preserves the eleven comedies of
Aristophanes.
The codex arrived in the West in 1423, through the agency of
Giovanni Aurispa, who saved this and many other precious manuscripts from the imminent fall of Constantinople, taking them to Florence, to the humanist
Niccolò de' Niccoli. In 1516
Bernardo Giunta
Bernardo is a given name and less frequently an Italian, Portuguese and Spanish surname. Possibly from the Germanic "Bernhard".
Given name People
* Bernardo the Japanese (died 1557), early Japanese Christian convert and disciple of Saint Fra ...
used it for the first printed edition of
Lysistrata and
Thesmophoriazusae
''Thesmophoriazusae'' ( grc-gre, Θεσμοφοριάζουσαι; ''Thesmophoriazousai'', meaning ''Women Celebrating the Festival of the Thesmophoria''), or ''Women at the Thesmophoria'' (sometimes also called ''The Poet and the Women''), is o ...
; the traces of the manuscript were lost until 1712, when the abbot Pietro Canneti found it at last in Pisa and brought it to Ravenna, in the library of the Monastery of Classe.
[ Simone Beta, ''La donna che sconfigge la guerra: Lisistrata racconta la sua storia'' Carocci editore, 2022.]
Notes
{{reflist
Aristophanes
Greek manuscripts
Ravenna