Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
Lots of excitement on the Methodius manuscripts this morning — Adrian Tanasescu-Vlas has been through the STSL Ms. 40 and identified the works on Methodius in it. I’ll do some more on this after lunch. He confirms that De lepra is in there, which means that it is now possible to get someone who knows [...]
Well, I’ve now managed to create two PDF’s of page images of the Old Slavic manuscripts of Methodius, one of ms. 40 and one of ms. 41. The contents of the two mss are different, tho. The PDF’s are really too large to use. I wonder if there is a catalogue around anywhere, that would [...]
A commenter has discovered two manuscripts of the Old Slavonic Methodius online! The manuscripts used by Michael Chub, when he edited some of the works, are apparently accessible: Some good news. I found the scans of two Old Slavic manuscripts used by Archbishop Mikhail. See http://www.stsl.ru/manuscripts/index.php?col=5&gotomanuscript=040, the first two manuscripts (40 and 41) from the [...]
Some time back I discovered that a Russian translation existed of the works of Methodius of Olympus (d.311 AD). This is significant, since most of the works of Methodius known today have survived only in Old Slavic, or Old Russian. The translation was made by Evgraf Loviagin, and the 2nd edition appeared in St. Petersburg [...]
Regular readers will remember that I commissioned an English translation of the German version by Bonwetsch of Methodius’ De Lepra (On leprosy). I did so, because the work is preserved in an Old Slavonic text, which has never been published, plus Greek fragments. The GCS series published a German translation by Bonwetsch of the Old Slavonic, [...]
Sometimes it just doesn’t work. This morning I started looking through the translation of the German version of Methodius, De lepra, as given by Bonwetsch from the Old Slavonic. The translation into English — for which I am paying commercially — just didn’t work. The translator did not have the feel for ecclesiastical works, and [...]
A reader kindly purchased a CD of my collection of the Fathers in English (available here). Since this collections is something that I work on continuously, I don’t keep a stock. So the order meant that I had to produce one. I spent most of the morning trying to do so, and having baffling difficulties. This was [...]
I’ve been translating from Russian the preface to a group of works by Methodius, as I mentioned here. It’s no work of scholarship, but the end product, from some Google Translate and the kind help of Maureen in the comments, is now online here: http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/methodius_preface_chub.htm It’s public domain as usual: do whatever you wish with [...]
This evening I sat down with the text of Michael Chub’s preface to his edition of a selection of the works of Methodius.. I took the output from Google Translate, and went through it, smoothing and amending. I got a very long way! It’s about 3,400 words, and nearly all of it fell into English [...]
A dull Saturday morning, and I went into town and visited the local library, in search of my book order from Tuesday. On entering my ears were assailed with music, from some device stationed on the enquiries desk, and there were stalls filling the main library area. Apparently the library had been turned into a tatty-looking craft [...]