ABSTRACT
On the other hand, I think that we might attribute to the paradoxical contingencies of those 'fortunes' the very fact that the manuscript tradition of this story of a childless, solitary but by no means scholastic hero; of a sinful and so to say 'idiosyncratic', yet admittedly attractive figure, seems to have been 'transformed' on a pattern derived from monastery and school. In other words, that the story has been recreated on what is, by common consent at least, a highly unheroic basis. Indeed, no-one has yet attempted to tell us just how far it is a matter of chance that the manuscripts of the Greek work derived, were discovered, ended up, or even left their last known traces, in the places that they did. These places are as different in location and character as the Orthodox Monastery of the Virgin of Soumela in the Pontos, the monastery of Grottaferrata, attached to the Greek rite under the authority of the Church of Rome, and the strictly Catholic monastery-palace of the Escorial; as different as the ancient Lincoln College, Oxford and the twenty-year-old Library of the Department of Classics and Ancient History in the University of Thessaloniki.1
