What is a "reinked" manuscript?

Question

So, I'm checking a variant in the CNTTS critical apparatus and look up some info on a couple manuscripts that support a reading. According to CNTTS the manuscript is "a reinked manuscript of the entire New Testament." What is reinked? Is the CNTTS using this term to refer to a manuscript with corrections in a later hand? Please include a source using the term "reinked" in context. Thanks.

Answer 1

A reinked manuscript is indeed a manuscript where a later scribe wrote over the letters. The scribe might be trying to preserve a text that otherwise would be lost or might be making "corrections." Reinking a manuscript makes paleographic analysis very difficult because the original handwriting is overwritten. Reinking also tends to obscure accent marks and punctuation.

Codex Vaticanus is a reinked manuscript (emphasis added):

A single scribe seems to have been responsible for the New Testament, though two scribes worked on the Old. There were two primary correctors, though the dates of both are rather uncertain. The first is tentatively dated to the sixth century; the second comes from the tenth or eleventh. The second of these is much the more important, though more for damage done than for the actual readings supplied. This scribe, finding the manuscript somewhat faded, proceeded to re-ink the entire text (except for a few passages which he considered inauthentic). This scribe also added accents and breathings. This re-inking had several side effects, all of them (from our standpoint) bad. First, it defaced the appearance of the letters, making it much harder to do paleographic work. Second, it rendered some of the readings of the original text impossible to reconstruct. And third (though related to the preceding), it makes it very difficult to tell if there are any original accents, breathings, punctuation, etc. Such marks will generally disappear under the re-inking. Only when such a mark has not been re-inked can we be sure it came from the original hand.