As 2025 comes to a close, one last article is coming out:

“Mise-en-page Between Roman Egypt and Medieval Europe: The Recette de Saint-Remi and the Layout of an Early Greek Parchment Codex (P.Ant. 1 27),” Fragmentology 8 (2025), 155-169.

This article (available open access!) originated from a survey of the manuscripts usually regarded as the earliest non-Christian codices. There are a number of interesting things to observe in the corpus, but one item that stood out to me was P.Ant. 1 27 (TM 59621), a nicely preserved parchment folium containing a portion of Demosthenes, De corona. The original editors (C.H. Roberts and J.C Dancy) had assigned it to the third century, but it had more recently been reassigned to the second century.

Roberts and Darcy commented upon the layout of the text in two neat columns with wide margins: “The total effect is thus that of a spacious and well-proportioned page.” In fact, the layout of this manuscript aligns shockingly well with a set of somewhat idiosyncratic instructions for laying out a page preserved in the margins of a medieval Latin manuscript (BnF Latin 11884). The manuscript dates to the late ninth century, and the marginal addition, the so-called Recette de Saint-Remi, was probably added in the tenth century.

This similarity between the layout of P.Ant. 1 27 and the recipe has some important implications: Either this recipe for laying out the page has very early roots and the technology of the parchment codex had already reached a highly developed state by the second century, or P.Ant. 1 27 has been assigned a date that is perhaps a bit too early. The article contains an investigation of the dating of this codex, which turned up some fascinating details about the archaeological context of the papyri excavated at Antinoopolis during the Egypt Exploration Fund campaign of 1913-1914. This in turn led to a series of interesting discoveries relating to the Antinoopolis papyri that I will outline in a couple other articles that will hopefully be out soon. A good new year to all!