[dhosek]

Pre-modern manuscript practices are remarkably alien to us today. A single codex might contain multiple works in it with no external indication of its contents. It's entirely possible that many lost works are sitting in manuscript libraries because nobody has been able to catalog everything in them. Add in the palimpsest practice (which would not only impact situations like Saint Catherine's but would also cause a manuscript containing some pagan text to be overwritten with a Christian text—or in later centuries for a Christian text to be overwritten with an Islamic text) and it's entirely possible that somewhere there's a copy of Aristotle's Second book of Poetics or more of Sappho than we currently have. It kind of excites me to consider the possibilities (and wonder if the alternate universe version of me who majored in classics might be combing through the Vatican archives right now).