How were Catullus’s poems rediscovered around 1300?

The survival of the poetry of Catullus was extremely precarious, as his work fell out of circulation between the end of the 2nd century and the end of the 12th century. Knowledge of his poems today depends entirely on a single manuscript that was discovered around 1300.1

This original manuscript was copied twice and subsequently lost. One of those two copies was then copied twice more before it, too, was lost. Scholars have been able to reconstruct the lost "archetype" of his work by comparing the three surviving copies, which are currently held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the Vatican Library in Rome.1