Una miscellanea profetica «aperta»: Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, ms. K.VI.62

In medieval Europe, miscellaneous manuscripts represented a common form of transmission of a wide range of texts, both literary and technical ones. Amidst the array of recent scholarship that has sought to refine our way of classifying, describing and analysing this type of manuscript, there is a relatively neglected category of texts: prophecies. The importance of miscellanies and compilations in the transmission of prophetic texts is well known, but most of the sources has not yet been investigated. This article analyses the different layers of a so far unknown codex (Siena, Biblioteca Comunale K.VI.62), in which a number of widespread texts (Telesphorus of Cosen- za’s Libellus, the Vaticinia de summis pontificibus) are collected together with much rarer ones (prophecies concerning the Turks, the Prophecy of the True Emperor). Through a close reading of the manuscript and a comparative overview of other prophetic miscel- lanies, this paper highlights some methodological issues related to the transmission of prophetic texts: the presence of rare texts, their unusual attribution, and the joint tradition of clusters of texts.