From Mistra to Italy. Scholarly Practices and Cultural Transfer in Light of Signs and Texts

The research project investigates the cultural activity of Byzantine scribes and scholars who were trained in Mistra at George Gemistos Pletho’s school from the 1430s to the 1460s and, after the Turkish conquest of Morea in 1460, moved to Italy as refugees. The main goal of this research is to collect texts and copyists who can be referred to Pletho’s milieu in a monographic and systematic study. The connection between Mistra and these personalities, including the still anonymous ones, will be reconstructed by the direct analysis of manuscripts and archival documents from a philological, paleographical and codicological point of view.