Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
Mike Aquilina of Way of the Fathers has drawn my attention to a Vatican Radio announcement: 256 Vatican manuscripts have gone online. A list by shelfmark is here. They are mostly from the Palatine collection, which in turn contains a lot of the loot from the ancient monastery of Lorsch, destroyed during the 30 years [...]
A marvellous post at the British Library manuscripts blog. It begins with the encouraging statement: The British Library is committed to making available online as many of its medieval manuscripts as possible. And then it goes on to discuss how the ancient Codex Alexandrinus of the bible, currently bound in 4 volumes, had to be [...]
Via Paleojudaica I learn of a workshop, taking place in Oslo, which sounds rather interesting: WORKSHOP AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OSLO: Textual Transmission and Manuscript Culture: Textual Fluidity, “New Philology,” and the Nag Hammadi (and Related) Codices This is the first major international workshop of the NEWCONT-project.Starting tomorrow. Pseudepigrapha and Hermetica figure in the program [...]
Via AWOL I learn that an edition and translation of Bar Hebraeus’ scholia on the Old Testament is now available in PDF form online from the University of Chicago. The PDF is here (linked on that page under the red down-arrow next to the text “Terms of Use”. In addition, an interesting volume, The Early Text of [...]
Francesca Schironi’s book on how the end of a work was marked in an ancient papyrus roll ends with a dossier of photographs, as I remarked earlier. I think that it would be useful to give some extracts from this, as we all think about a subject better when we can see what we are [...]
Ancient works were frequently divided into many books. What did the end of a book look like, in an ancient roll? To answer this question requires examining papyri which contain such items. Francesca Schironi assembled a dossier, with photographs, of 55 papyrus fragments, 51 of them from Homer. Her analysis is very dense, and her conclusions deserve to [...]
An early editor, Antonio Agustin, in his preface to his edition of 1559, describes the transmission as follows: In these twenty books, which he entitled de verborum significatione, or priscorum verborum cum exemplis, Sextus Pompeius Festus abridged the books of Verrius Flaccus on the same subject. For he omitted the words which were, in Verrius’ [...]
I’ve commissioned translations of Ephraim the Syrian, Hymns against heresies 23 and 24, to be done by Christmas. Looking forward to those! Together with hymn 22, they form a group against Marcionism. I’ve now received by ILL To Mega Biblion, on the presence of end titles and the like in ancient papyri of Homer. It [...]
There is a manuscript in the Farnese collection, in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples (shelfmark Bibl. Naz. IV.A.3), known as the Farnesianus or F, because it once formed part of the library of Cardinal Ranuccio Farnese. This contains a text consisting of words and definitions, entitled De significatione verborum, On the meaning of words. The [...]
A comment by Dr Divna Manolova on my post about some of the Heidelberg manuscripts picked up on a problem; that I could not tell what the 141 folios of ms. Palatinus graecus 129 actually contained. It seems that it consists of working notes by a Byzantine scholar, Nikephoros Gregoras (d. ca. 1359/1360). The manuscript contains a [...]