Abstract

Although the manuscript had already been used from the sixteenth century onward, scholarly knowledge of the famous Codex Vaticanus (Vat. gr. 1209 in the Vatican Library) was very limited even in the first half of the eighteenth century. Scholars outside Rome had to rely on secondary and imprecise information. However, there is one remarkable piece of work that has long been overlooked. Probably during the course of 1738 and 1739, Thomas Wagstaffe prepared a detailed account of Codex Vaticanus, including not only general introductions but also analyses of different dimensions of the manuscript. Wagstaffe’s account was never published, and it is currently preserved in the "Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma". Based on the personal examination of this archive entry, this article gives relevant historical contexts, details its current state of conservation and content, provides transcriptions of some notable portions, and offers a critical evaluation of Wagstaffe’s descriptions and judgements of the manuscript. These findings on the one hand show the pioneering nature of the work, and on the other hand shed light on the history of biblical textual scholarship.