Anonymous professor and monk Ephraim: a small group of Byzantine intellectuals of the 10th century

The article discusses several successive small groups of Byzantine intellectuals of the 10th century: “Anonymous Professor” and his students, which included the famous scribe Monk Ephraim and a circle of scribes focusing on the monk Ephraim, two of whom, calligrapher Basil and priest John, are known to us by name. Separately, it is worthy to pay attention to the “descendant” of the Monk Ephraim “ὁ ἀπόγονος”, who wrote the ‘Perlschrift’ manuscript in the second half of the 11th century and who remembered his famous predecessor. This case, a unique for Byzantium of the 10th - 11th centuries, allows the author to trace a continuity of the “schools” of writing and other intellectual activities. It is important that the emergence of the all-Byzantine capital style ‘Perlschrift’ of the second half of the 10th - 11th centuries from the Monk Ephraim’s handwriting, which was traced by palaeographers based on formal criteria, now receives a human dimension of the transmission of tradition from teacher to student (or descendant) within three or four generations of scribes. It is a rare case for paleographers to trace a full cycle of the existence of the handwriting named ‘Perlschrift’, from its invention in the middle of the 10th century until its disappearance in the late 11th century.