A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger: A Study of Six Leaves of an Uncial Manuscript Preserved: In the Pierpont Morgan Library New York

Six vellum leaves. That is all that survives of a once-complete book, yet these fragments contain letters by Pliny the Younger, copied by anonymous hands in the sixth century, in the elegant curves of uncial script. This is paleography rendered as detective work: E.A. Lowe examines every faded letter, every scrape of erasure, every quirk of spacing to date the manuscript, trace its origins, and assess its relationship to other copies of Pliny's letters that circulated through the monasteries of late antiquity. The fragment arrived at the Pierpont Morgan Library with a hidden history, and Lowe reconstructs that journey with scholarly rigor. What emerges is not merely a catalog of physical details but a meditation on how classical literature survived the collapse of Rome itself: copied by hand, carried across continents, preserved in monastic libraries while the world outside transformed beyond recognition. For anyone fascinated by the material reality of the past, by the objects that carry thought across centuries, these six leaves are a rare and tangible link to late antiquity.