The life of St. Pancratius of Taormina: a comparative analysis of excerpts from manuscripts of the 10th and 11th centuries

This work is dedicated to the comparison of textual variants of the Life of St. Pancratius of Taormina represented in manuscripts of the 10th and 11th centuries. The presumable full corpus of Pancratius story is told in thirteen Greek manuscripts that have been currently uncovered. One of them, the 11th century AD manuscript, written in Koine Greek, is currently being reposited in State Historical Museum in Moscow under cipher GIM Vlad. 381 (Sin. gr. 15). In this paper the manuscript Sin. gr. 15 is analyzed from codicological and paleographic perspectives; it is also compared to the manuscripts of the first edition. The purpose of the study includes a comparative analysis, namely through reading, studying and translation of excerpts from the lives in Greek language into modern Russian. The comparison between the first edition and the unpublished second edition of the Life of St. Pancratius points to significant textual differences, both compositional and linguistic. The composition of the first edition is more extensive, while the second one is shortened and stylistically improved as a result of literary processing, as compared to the first version. Thus, the aforementioned conclusion confirms the hypothesis that the two editions appeared at different historical periods and in different intellectual circles.