Tag: Nicholas of Myra

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email arrived late yesterday from the library, advising me that a book had arrived, and apologising in case someone else had notified me already.  This was not the case, so I infer that my book had been sat there at the library for some time.  This morning I went in and collected it, and paid the interlibrary loan fee.  I walked down the street in a thin rain to a cafe, and sat there, with a scone and a diet coke, and examined the treasure.

The book is a monograph by Elaine Treharne, The Old English Life of St Nicholas with the Old English Life of St Giles, Leeds University (1997).  Google Books had alerted me that it contained interesting things, but I was unable to locate a PDF.

A google search on the author suggests that Dr Treharne must have been about the age of twelve when she wrote it, because she seems to be a young scholar even now.

To my delight, in an appendix it contains a Latin text of John the Deacon, while not actually saying so.  This is a transcription from a Cotton manuscript which is not online.  I have already scanned those pages and made a machine comparison with the Mombritius edition which has become my reference text.

The monograph is a very dry volume, as most are, and quite rightly.  I’ve seen two reviews, which merely highlight how useful it is to have a text and translation.  There is also a rather acid review by Bengt Lindström, highlighting a load of errors in the translation and suggesting that the book should not have been accepted for publication.  I cannot comment on any of that, knowing no Anglo-Saxon, but I do know from experience that anybody can improve a translation, and find errors.   It’s very easy.  Actually making the first translation is the hard bit.  However what is indeed useful in the Lindström review is the very many corrections.  It also highlights that many reviewers are not really doing their job.  Improving the book is what a review should do.

Working with the Nicholas literature is hard, because we lack proper critical editions of the texts.  So all that anybody can do is to take small steps forward.  Publishing the Old English text and translation is a very useful thing to do, therefore.  I noticed that in some ways Dr T. was in the same position as I am.  I can’t do a proper job on the Latin text, because the Greek on which it is based has never been translated and is very hard to work with.  So I ignore it as best I can.  Dr T is working on the Old English, so has to bodge her way a bit with what she says about the Latin, because this too has not been studied properly.  This is what everybody will have to do.

I’m doing bits and pieces at the moment.  Meisen’s Nikolauskult volume has reached me, and I have OCR’d, but no more.  I will need to look through it.  I’ve been creating a file with the Latin miracle stories in it, that infest the manuscripts of John the Deacon, and a draft translation of each.  Currently it contains about 30 episodes.  I hope to do a few more, and then I will post it online purely as a tool, for others and for myself, to aid with working with the Latin Nicholas literature.  Then I need to get back to the text of John the Deacon.

Share

“Duo mercatores” – Another miracle story about St Nicholas (BHL 6159)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Here’s the Latin text and a Google translation of another of the random miracle stories that fill up the medieval manuscripts of the Life of St Nicholas.  This one is uncommon. The Bollandists assign it the number BHL 6159, and it only appears in three manuscripts, all in Belgium.  None of these are online.  Luckily the Bollandists transcribed the text in Anecdota Bollandiana 4, p.203-4, which I reproduce below.  (AB4 is actually online at Google Books, but good luck in finding it!  I wish I’d kept the URL).

Again the translation is that of Google, but I’ve tweaked it a bit.

Duo mercatores consocii fuerunt, qui lustrando diversas regiones vendendo et emendo infinitam congregaverant pecuniam.  Deinde repatriantes, in cujusdam noctis crepusculo in hospitio unius eorum magno sunt recepti gaudio.  Nec mora, post susceptam cibi potusque receptionem fessa corpora dormitioni dederunt.

Interea antiquus ille humani generis persecutor fallaciae venenum in pectus mulieris infudit, ut domino suo consiliaretur illum socium suum clam intempesta nocte interimere, quatenus divitias utrorumque labore partas solus obtineret.  Quod dum mulier perfida auribus viri primo renuentis hortando, admonendo, obsecrando saepius instillavit, instinctu antiqui serpentis voluntati suae pestiferae acquievit citissime.  Igitur mitem immites, fidelem infideles sopori deditum more lupi membratim distrahunt, membra quidem in penetralibus suis occultantes, et immensam illius pecuniam in receptaculis abscondentes.

Matutinali vero tempore fama undique replevit confinia unum illorum cum gaudio reversum, alterum vero nusquam comparuisse.  Uxor igitur illius, hac dira legatione suscepta, quasi amens socium mariti sui aggreditur, quaerens quo vir suus devenisset. At ille, plenus fallacia, affirmabat multimodis juramentis hesterna nocte eum cum copiosa pecunia ab hospitio suo discessisse, nec postea vidisse.

Mulier vero his verbis utpote sagittis vulnerata letiferis, ad statuam sancti Nicolai, quam adorare consueverat, recucurrit, dolore dictante, in haec verba prorumpens:  “Tu gemma sacerdotii, electe Dei confessor, Nicolae, cujus misericordia et pietati virum meum, me ipsam et res nostras commiseram, quare nos oblivioni dedisti? Quamobrem virum meum mihi non reddidisti?  Vere nunc, si maritum meum tibi commissum mihi non reddideris, nomini tuo amodo nec gloriam conferam, nec honorem.”

Haec et his similia postquam flendo dixerat, discessit, obvians sancto Nicolao. Cui sanctus his usus est verbis: “Quid fles?  cur lacrimis manas?” Cui dum mulier omnia sicut gesta erant seriatim exposuerat, a sancto Nicolao ducta est ad viri sui occisorem.

Quem electus Dei servus his aggreditur interrogationibus: “Dic mihi, miser, dic ubi sit maritus istius mulieris.”   Qui postquam juramentis multimodis affirmavit socium suum in praeteritae noctis crepusculo sanum et incolumem discessisse, egregius Dei amicus, invocato Creatoris coeli et terrae nomine, occisum admonuit ut, si in receptaculis illius hospitii occultatus fuisset, responsum non denegaret.   Mira res: vix sanctus sermonem finierat, cum lingua dilaniati corporis aperta voce se adesse respondit.  Cujus vocem vir Domini hilari corde percipiens, membra illius dilacerata sibi praesentari jussit; et invocata summi regis majestate, anima ad corpus rediit.

Quo viso, postquam electus Dei servus omnipotenti Deo dignas persolvit gratias, erectum virum uxori reddidit, dicens: “Ecce, per Dei misericordiam virum quem mihi commendasti tibi sanum reddo.” Unde mulier laetificata gratias egit sancto Nicolao et omnipotenti Deo, cui est honor et gloria in seculorum secula.

There were two merchant partners who, by visiting different countries and selling and buying, had amassed an infinite amount of money.  Then returning home, in the twilight of a certain night they were received with great joy in the lodgings of one of them.  And without delay, after receiving the welcome of food and drink, their tired bodies gave way to sleep.

Meanwhile, that ancient persecutor of the human race poured the poison of deception into a woman’s breast, to advise her lord to kill his partner secretly in the dead of night, in order that he alone may obtain the riches obtained by the labour of both.  While the perfidious woman repeatedly poured into the ears of the man, who at first refused, encouraging, admonishing, and imploring, he very quickly yielded to the suggestion of the ancient serpent of his malicious will. So like wolves the faithless savage ones cut the sleeping mild faithful one to pieces, indeed hiding the limbs in their inmost places, and concealing his immense wealth in the hidden places.

But in the morning the report filled the neighbourhood from all sides that one of them had returned with joy, but that the other was nowhere to be found. His wife, therefore, receiving this terrible news, attacked her husband’s companion as if mad, demanding where her husband had gone. But he, full of deceit, affirmed with many oaths that he had left his lodgings last night with a large sum of money, and that he had not seen him since.

But with these words the woman, as if she had been pierced by arrows, ran back to the statue of St. Nicholas, which she was accustomed to venerate, and, speaking with pain, burst into these words: “You jewel of the priesthood, chosen confessor of God, Nicholas, to whose mercy and piety I committed my husband, myself, and our affairs, why have you consigned us to forgetfulness?  Why did you not give me back my husband? Truly now, if you do not return to me my husband who was committed to you, I will give neither glory nor honor to your name.”

After she had said these and similar things, weeping, she departed, and met St. Nicholas. To whom the saint used these words: “Why do you weep? why do you shed tears?” While the woman seriously explained everything as it had happened to him, she was led by St. Nicholas to her husband’s murderer.

The chosen servant of God attacked him with these questions: “Tell me, wretch, tell me where that woman’s husband is.”  After he had affirmed by many oaths that his companion had departed safe and sound at the twilight of the previous night, the distinguished friend of God, invoking the name of the Creator of heaven and earth, commanded the murdered man, that if he was hidden in the hiding places of that lodging, he would not refuse to answer. A strange thing: scarcely had the saint finished speaking, when, with the tongue of his torn body, he answered in a clear voice that he was present.  The man of God, perceiving his voice with a joyful heart, commanded that his torn limbs should be presented to him; and being invoked by the majesty of the supreme king, the soul returned to the body.

When he saw this, after the chosen servant of God had paid the due thanks to Almighty God, he restored the husband to his wife, saying: “Behold, by the mercy of God I restore to you the man whom you entrusted to me.” Whereupon the woman, delighted, gave thanks to Saint Nicholas and to Almighty God, to whom be honour and glory forever and ever.

    *    *    *    *

This story reminded me of an anecdote.  There were once a pair of men who ran a shop.  While cashing up, one discovered that a customer had inadvertently given him two $50 notes stuck together instead of one.  This, he said to his son, meditatively, raised an important moral question: should he tell his business partner?  The answer of this honest merchant to his dilemma is not recorded.

Share

Five miracle stories about St Nicholas

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The medieval manuscripts that contain the Life of St Nicholas almost always continue with a mass of miracle stories about the saint.  The 1751 pre-critical edition by Falconius does the same.  The genuine Life by John the Deacon ends with his “chapter 13” – the numbering is his – but there are more chapters.  Anybody who looks at the manuscripts will find this mass of stuff on the end, which frankly adds very little.  C. W. Jones, in his book on the legends of the saint, dismisses it in a  sentence.

Since I scanned Falconius, I thought I would scan up to the end.  This would give me a file with the additional material in it.  When working with the manuscripts, you can get lost, and it can be  very helpful to do “Ctrl-F” on some wording and find out where you are.

Just for fun, I then pushed each chapter in turn through Google Translate, to get an idea of the content.  I was amazed – once again – at the quality of the translation.  I did the same with Falconius’ increasingly sarcastic footnotes.

I won’t do much more with this.  It is just a means to an end.  But nobody ever does anything with this stuff, as far as I can see.  So I thought that I would share the contents here.  I’ve not troubled to correct the translation much, so it’s more or less as it came out.  Of course if you see an obvious error, do signal it in the comments and I will fix it.

The effort was valuable in another way.  We can get an idea of just how carefully Falconius worked on his edition.  How?  Well, from the fact that he misnumbered his own chapters.  There really are *two* chapters  marked “XVII”, “17”!  Not good.

I’ve added the BHL numbers for each text (=Bibliographia Hagiographica Latina, the index of all saints’ lives).  I also went and looked at the earliest manuscript, Paris BNF lat. 989 (10th century) for the places where Falconius indicated uncertainty.

    *    *    *    *

The start of the first story in Paris BNF 989, fol. 91v.

[BHL 6150]  XIV. (a) Quodam itaque tempore, advenit quadam mulier, de vico qui dicitur Cyparissus, ad sanctissimam domum Archangeli, qui vocatur Croba, ubi erat sanctus Nicolaus. Haec adtulit filium suum, quem iniquissimus daemon ita vexabat crudeliter ut etiam vestimentum, quo induebatur, dentibus laceraret. Quem projecit ad pedes sancti Nicolai, flens et dicens, “Miserere serve Dei huic misello filio meo, quia fortiter vexatur a daemonio.” Pietate autem ductus, sanctus Dei famulus super eum apprehendit manum ejus, et insuper flavit in ore illius. Statimque, divina virtute et beati Nicolai meritis emundatus, immundus ab eo evanuit spiritus, sanusque ad propria, cum matre sua exsultans, reversus est.

(a) Has lectiones, 14.15.16.17 & 18, non Johannes Diaconus, sed alius ex Actis antiquis consarcinavit cap. 30. ipso seculo decimo, vel undecimo (quod est verisimilius) qui, ad usum Ecclesiae Neapolitanae, Diaconum in lectiones redegit.

At a certain time, there came a certain woman, from a town called Cyparissus, to the most holy house of the Archangel, called Croba, where St. Nicholas was. She brought her son, whom the most wicked demon was tormenting so cruelly that he even tore the clothes which he was wearing with his teeth. She laid him at the feet of St. Nicholas, weeping and saying, “Have mercy on this poor son of mine, servant of God, because he is strongly tormented by a demon.” But led by piety, the holy servant of God took hold of his hand over him, and, moreover, blew into his mouth. And at once, cleansed by the divine power and by the merits of the blessed Nicholas, the unclean spirit disappeared from him, and in good health he returned, rejoicing with his mother, to his home.

(a). These readings, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18, are not by John the Deacon, but were stitched on the end from some earlier Acts, ch. 30, by someone else, of the 10th or (more likely) 11th century, who arranged John’s text into readings according to the usage of the Neapolitan church.

The BHLMS lists 49 manuscripts of this story.

[BHL 6151] XV. Rursus autem alio tempore, altera mulier, de vico Neapoleos (b), ab immundo Spiritu graviter torquebatur. Quam assumens vir ejus, adduxit ad monasterium Viri Dei, ubi ipse tunc temporis morabatur (c), et projecit eam ad pedes beati Nicolai, dicens, “Sancte Dei, succurre huic mulieri miserae, quae graviter torquetur a daemonio.” Sanctus autem Dei Nicolaus, mox, ut orationem fudit pro ea ad Dominum, immundum ab ea pepulit Spiritum, et sana effecta, abiit in domum suam, glorificans Deum,et sanctam Sion. Hoc erat vocabulum monasterii Sancti Nicolai: id est Sancta Hierusalem.

(b) Haec sumpta est ex fine cap. 29.  Sed ibi pro Neapoli est Nicapo.

(c) Sic saltat foveam homo cautus.  Ubi modo est, ille Myrensis Archiepiscopus Nicolaus?

Then again, at another time, another woman, from the village of Naples,(b) was severely tormented by an unclean spirit. Her husband picked her up and brought her to the monastery of the Man of God, where at that time he was staying, and laid her at the feet of blessed Nicholas, saying, “Saint of God, help this poor woman, who is severely tormented by a demon.” Then Nicholas, the saint of God, immediately, as he poured out a prayer for her to the Lord, drove away the impure spirit from her, and being healed, she went to her house, glorifying God and Holy Sion. This was the name of the monastery of St. Nicholas: that is, “Holy Jerusalem”.

(b) This is taken from the end of ch. 29. But there for “Neapoli” it reads “Nicapo”.

(c) Thus a cautious man leaps over a pitfall. In what way is this about Archbishop Nicolaus of Myra?

The BHLMS lists 48 manuscripts of this story.  The oldest is BNF 989 (10th c.) which reads “Necapoleos”.

[BHL 6152] XVI. Venit quidam homo ad Sanctam Sion, nomine Nicolaus, de vico Sibino, (d) tempore Sancti Jejunii. Hic adduxit quendam infirmum, super animali sedentem, ad Sanctum Nicolaum, ut saluti eum pristinae redderet. Erat autem homo ille toto exsiccatus corpore, ab ea aegritudine, quae Graeco vocabulo, “paralysis”, Latine vero “resolutio membrorum” dicitur. Quem in conspectu viri Dei, in terram projiciens, obsecrat dicens, “Nicolae vir Dei, pro isto misello homine interveni, quatenus per tuas sanctas orationes propitietur ei Deus.” Cujus infirmitati, plurimum vir Dei condolens Nicolaus, assumpto oleo de dominica lampade, perunxit eum. Inde autem facta super eum oratione, illico eum pristinae reddidit sanitati. Benedictioneque percepta, reversus est ad domum suam, gratias agens glorificans Deum.

(d) Ex eodem cap. 30. sumpta.

A certain man, named Nicolaus, from the town of Sibinum,(d) came to Holy Sion at the time of Holy Lent. Here he brought a certain sick man, sitting on an animal, to St. Nicholas, that he might restore him to his former health. Now that man was withered throughout his body, from that sickness which in the Greek word is “paralysis”, but in Latin is called “the dissolution of the limbs”.  In the presence of the man of God, laying him on the ground, he beseeched him, saying, “Nicholas, man of God, intercede for this poor man, inasmuch as through your holy prayers God may be propitiated for him.” Nicholas, the man of God, sympathizing greatly with his infirmity, took oil from the Lord’s lamp and anointed him. Then, after a prayer was made over him, he immediately restored him to his former health. Having received the blessing, he returned to his house, giving thanks and glorifying God.

(d) Taken from the same ch. 30.

The BHLMS lists 47 manuscripts of this story.  BNF lat. 989 = “Sivino”.

[BHL 6153] XVII. Nec multo post, quidam energumenus, de vico Cendino (e); cui nomen erat Timotheus, adductus est in Monasterium Sanctae Sion, ad famulum Dei Nicolaum. Habebat enim homo ille spiritum pessimum, qui ita eum exagitabat, ut, per ligna et lapides, hinc et inde, caput suum percutiendo contunderet. Unde factum est, ut de creberrimis percussionibus, plagis horridis, caput vulneratum haberet, ita ut etiam sanies cum vermibus proflueret. Sustentatus itaque a tribus viris, perductus est, ut diximus, in Sanctam Sion, ad sanctissimum Dei famulum Nicolaum: Quem etiam orabant, ut suis eum curare precibus dignaretur. Inquiunt: “Nicolae serve Dei excelsi, conspice miseriam hominis hujus; ora pro eo ad Deum, ut possit evadere, et Christi consequi misericordiam.” Quem Sanctus Nicolaus, propriis consignans manibus; daemonium ab eo expulit, et ab omni aegritudine liberavit, et sanum et incolumem remisit ad propria: gaudens et glorificans Deum, qui hanc confessori suo, gratiam contulerat Nicolao.

(e) Et haec ex eodem cap. 30. sumpta est.  Sed pro “Cendino”, ibi est “Cedemorum”.  Num proprium sit “Cendenum”?

17.1. Not long after, a certain strong man, from the town of Cendinum,(e) whose name was Timotheus, was brought to the monastery of Holy Sion, to the servant of God Nicholas. For that man had a very bad spirit, which so agitated him, that he was bruising his head from side to side with sticks and stones. As a result he had a wounded head from the frequent knocks and terrible blows and it was oozing pus and worms. Supported therefore by three men, he was led, as we have said, to Holy Sion, to the most holy servant of God, Nicholas: whom they also begged, that he might condescend to cure him with his prayers. They said, “Nicholas, servant of God on high, behold the misery of this man; pray for him to God, that he may escape, and obtain the mercy of Christ.” St. Nicholas, sealing him with his own hands, cast out the demon from him, and freed him from all sickness, and sent him back to his own home, safe and sound, rejoicing and glorifying God, who had bestowed this favour upon his confessor, Nicholas.

(e) And these things were taken from the same ch. 30. But instead of “Cendino” this reads “Cedemorum”.  Possibly the correct reading is “Cendenum”?

The BHLMS lists 50 manuscripts of this story.  BNF 989 = “Cendino”.

[BHL 6154]  XVII. Cum igitur his, et aliis pluribus miraculis, ac virtutibus beatissimus floreret Nicolaus, decidit in aegritudinem, de qua, ex hac instabili luce subtractus est. Qui cum jaceret in grabatu; accessit ad eum quaedam mulier lunatica, de vico Olcon (f); cujus nomen erat Eugenia. Quae eum exorabat, ut sibi conferre dignaretur sanitatis gaudia.  Cujus precibus beatus Nicolaus annuens; pro ea fudit orationem ad Dominum. Deinde signavit eam: sicque sanitatem, quam optabat consequi; adipisci promeruit. Remeans ergo mulier ad propria; sana et incolumis, magnifice collaudavit Dominum Jesum Christum; qui in Sanctis suis, semper est mirabilis.

(f) Haec etiam ex Actis sumpta est cap. 31.

17.2.  Therefore, while the most blessed Nicholas was flourishing with these and many other miracles and virtues, he fell into an illness, because of which he was withdrawn from this unstable light. When he was lying on a pallet, a certain lunatic woman came to him, from the town of Olcon (f), whose name was Eugenia. She entreated him to condescend to confer upon her the joys of health. Blessed Nicholas, assenting to her prayers, poured out a prayer for her to the Lord. Then he signed her [with the cross], and so succeeded in securing the health which she wished to obtain. The woman, therefore, returning to her own home, safe and sound, praised the Lord Jesus Christ magnificently, who is always wonderful in His Saints.

(f) This is also taken from those Acts ch. 31.

The BHLMS lists 59 manuscripts of this story.

    *    *    *    *

There are many more tales of this sort.  I shall look at some more.

Share

From my diary – thoughts about the text of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have now scanned in the text of Corsi’s edition of John the Deacon, and found that – as he says – it is really a transcription of the Berlin manuscript, with better punctuation, plus a collation with the 1751 Falconius edition. He didn’t look at the Mombritius or Mai editions.

But that’s just fine.  It means that we can do an electronic comparison of Corsi’s text – the Berlin manuscript – with the other three editions – Falconius, Mai and Mombritius.

When I compare Falconius with Corsi, using dwdiff and dwdiff viewer that I wrote, the initial differences are small:

Small differences between Falconius and Corsi

But then when you look at chapter 12, and 13, the comparison goes nuts.  These are not the same text, basically:

Massive differences between the Falconius edition and Corsi's edition

In fact Corsi himself says the same: he didn’t bother to give an apparatus.

On the other hand if I compare the Mombritius (1498) edition with Corsi, at once we see that we’re dealing with the same text:

Small differences between Mombritius and Corsi in chapter 12

This is very useful, although a little bit annoying in that I have already translated chapters 12 and 13 from Falconius.  So there are now a few things to do, focusing on chapters 12 and 13:

  • Mark up the manuscript print-outs to indicate exactly where chapter 12 and 13 appear, and see which version of the text is contained in each.
  • Look at the two Vatican manuscripts that Falconius used, find chapters 12 and 13, and see if these reflect Falconius’ text, or Corsi’s.  I have an idea that they will in fact reflect that of Corsi.  Falconius used a lectionary from Naples, but the Naples manuscripts are not online.  There is clearly an article to be written on what exactly Falconius did, when he produced his edition, but not by me.

In the mean time I have been scanning the material in the Falconius edition which he himself states is not genuine (!) but from the Life of St Nicholas of Sion.  I’m correcting the OCR in Finereader 15 now, and he’s quite right – the chapters all refer explicitly to Sion monastery.

Once I have an electronic text of this, I can search it for words found elsewhere.  At least I will be able to identify *some* Nicholas of Sion material.

Of course this leads to the question of where the Life of St Nicholas of Sion might be found.  The Greek Life has been edited, and there is a 1984 translation into English by Sevcenko.  It might be worth my while to lay hands on this, although no copies are for sale.  But… what about the Latin Life?  Is there one?  Has any work been done on this?  Do I really want to find out?!

The original project was to produce a translation of the Life, as made by John the Deacon.  I don’t want to lose sight of this.  It is clear that Falconius has mixed in stuff which does not really belong to the Life of Nicholas of Myra.

Just to digress a moment, I was reflecting that all this is rather more serious than the “difficulties” of biblical critics, which seem to concentrate on a single word.  This is indeed what text criticism was devised for.

I’ve also been thinking about the dwdiff utility.  It seems merely to be a wrapper around something called wdiff, which itself is a wrapper around the standard tool diff, made by splitting the text into two files of words, and processing the output.  But unlike dwdiff, wdiff exists in a Windows version!  So I may go and investigate that.  It would be handy to avoid popping open a Ubuntu window every time I compare a text.

Lots to do.  I could use a few solid days on this, but, as ever, I can only do stuff in short bursts.  Still… lots to do!

Share

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Back to John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas.

I’ve now completely retranslated chapter 1, the prologue, which I made an attempt at last year.  I’ve been comparing the text of the Falconius (1751) edition, which I am translating, with the Mombritius (1498) and the Mai (1820-ish) editions, and finding small differences, and noting them.

Over the last week I started downloading copies of manuscripts from the Bibliotheque Nationale Francais site, Gallica.  I’ve been bookmarking the start of John the Deacon, and looking at two places, one at the start and one at the end of the chapter.  I’m seeing variation alright.  But many of these manuscripts are probably all closely related.  I now have 9 manuscripts on disk, 2 of which do not contain chapter 1.

I’ve got three different lists of manuscripts.  The Bollandists list 121, and there are clearly more.  I don’t know how many are online – possibly around 20, I would guess.

Just finding online manuscripts by shelfmark is hard.  I have discovered the Biblissima site, and am using this.

It’s very helpful that the BNF allow downloads.  Less helpful are sites like the Vatican that force you to use a crummy viewer.

Ideally I could collect manuscripts using my mobile phone while lying on the sofa.  In actual practice it is quite hard work just to collect them, even using the PC.  But I am learning all the time.

Onward!

Share

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve had no time to do anything useful for a week, but I’m still gathering materials on John the Deacon as a sideline.  Thanks to the kindness of Fr. Gerardo Cioffari at the St Nicholas Centre in Bari (= Centro Studi Nicolaiani) – himself a considerable scholar -, I now have access to Pasquale Corsi’s translation of John the Deacon.

I don’t dare look at Corsi’s translation until I’m rather more advanced with my own translation than I currently am!   Of course Dr Corsi worked on the text for years, rather than my dabbling, and knows far more about it.  Dr Cioffari also sent me a booklet with critical text of an important work on the translation of the relics of St Nicholas to Bari, which may be very useful in time.

The translation is contained in P. Corsi, La traslazione di San Nicola: Le fonti, Bari (1987), p.87-109.  His introduction is also useful, as this extract shows (plus google translate):

A tal fine, viene qui proposta una traduzione della Vita di san Nicola dal testo latino di Giovanni, diacono della Chiesa napoletana, il quale verso l’880 aveva tradotto precedenti fonti greche6. L’edizione seguita è quella da me stesso pubblicata di recente7, però con alcune modifiche sug­erite da ulteriori letture e da qualche ripensamento; naturalmente ho provveduto anche ad eliminare alcuni errori materiali di stampa. Per quanto riguarda la traduzione, ho cercato di mantenere un giusto equili­brio tra la fedeltà al testo latino e le strutture linguistiche dell’italiano mo­derno, allo scopo di non sacrificare né lo stile del nostro agiografo né la scorrevolezza della versione moderna. Ovviamente, non posso essere certo di essere riuscito nell’intento. Mi auguro comunqe di aver conservato per il lettore le principali caratteristiche dell’opera di Giovanni, senza per que­sto rendere difficoltosa la comprensione dei concetti e delle espressioni.

To this end, a translation of the Life of St. Nicholas is published here from the Latin text of John, deacon of the Neapolitan Church, who had translated previous Greek sources towards 1880 (6). The edition followed is the one I published recently (7), but with some changes suggested by further reading and some rethinking; naturally I have also taken steps to eliminate some printing errors. As for the translation, I have tried to maintain a fair balance between fidelity to the Latin text and the linguistic structures of modern Italian, in order not to sacrifice either the style of our hagiographer or the fluency of the modern version. Obviously, I cannot be sure that I have succeeded in this intention. However, I hope to have kept the main characteristics of John’s work for the reader, without making it difficult to understand the concepts and expressions.

6 BHL 6104-6117, particol 6104-6106; cfr. BHG 1352y. Si veda, in proposito, anche l’introduzione al saggio qui appresso citato al n. 7.  (=On this, see the introduction to the article in note 7 below)

 7 P. CORSI, La ‘‘Vita” di San Nicola e un codice della versione di Giovanni Diacono, in “Nicolaus” VII/2 (1979), pp. 359-380, particol. pp. 361-380.

I’ve now placed an interlibrary request for the article in note 7, which should bring the Latin text, as edited from Ms. Berlin 741.

Interestingly a random Google search revealed an earlier translation by P. Corsi, in Autori Vari, Bibliografia agiografica italiana 1976-1999, p.23, item 254:

254. Corsi Pasquale, Giovanni Diacono: Vita di San Nicola, tradotta dal latino dal ms. Berolin. 741. Bari. Centro Studi Nicolaiani. 1982. 28 pp., ill.

The St Nicholas Centre publications are very nicely printed and illustrated, I should add.

But Corsi’s edition, although certainly an advance on any previous edition, is not the critical edition that we all need.  This I learn from a really useful database page, at Mirabileweb, here:

Non è disponibile un’edizione critica; un recente lavoro di P. Corsi non esaurisce i complessi rapporti tra i lemmi BHL e le edizioni antiche di Mombrizio, Falconio e A. Mai.

A critical edition is not available; a recent work by P. Corsi does not exhaust the complex relationships between the BHL lemmas and the ancient editions of Mombrizio, Falconio and A. Mai.

This is in line with my own understanding: the transmission of the text is very complicated.  Somebody needs to do a doctoral thesis on it!

Share

St Nicholas and the story of the three schoolboys murdered by an inn-keeper and stashed in a pickling cask

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Saints’ Lives are a form of folk story.  These circulated widely in the middle ages, sometimes as ballads or plays, and they gained additional material from the need to tell a good story.  Tracing these stories back to a literary source can be time-consuming.

Today is St Nicholas’ Day, so an investigation of this sort seems appropriate.  A correspondent wrote to me a couple of days ago as follows:

One legend that is popular in the [medieval stained-glass] windows and also illuminated manuscripts of the same period is the legend of the three children resurrected from the pickling vat. I gather that this is a much later version of a legend of three scholars drugged and murdered. I cannot find any real source or text for this legend in Latin or a European language…

This legend is in fact known as the “Miracle of the Three Clerics”, in the short titles given by Charles W. Jones to the legends in his Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari and Manhattan, p.497-8.  But they are clearly youths, who have just received the tonsure, so we also have The Three Clerks, The Three Boys/Schoolboys, and so on.

Here is a 1390 illustration:

St Nicholas and the resurrection of the three murdered students. From the De Grey hours, via Wikipedia.

None of the early Greek legends contain this story, nor is it found in the Golden Legend, nor in the Roman breviary.  But it does appear in early French verse, and it is very popular indeed in artistic depictions, where it is the most popular of the miracles of St Nicholas.  By the 14th century in English wall paintings, St Nicholas almost always appears in the “Raising to Life of the Three Boys”.[1]

McKnight in his useful 1919 book on St Nicholas[2] gives this summary of the story:

Still another story in which St. Nicholas appears as the guardian angel of schoolboys, is the one dealing with the resuscitation of the three schoolboys murdered on their journey home. The story, which appears in a number of variant forms, relates how three boys, on their journey home from school, take lodging at an inn, or as some versions have it, farmhouse. In the night the treacherous host and hostess murder the boys, cut up their three bodies, and throw the pieces into casks used for salting meat. In the morning St. Nicholas appears and calls the guilty ones to task. They deny guilt, but are convicted when the saint causes the boys, sound of body and limb, to arise from the casks.

McKnight states in quotes that the story is “not known among the Greeks, who are so devoted to St. Nicholas”, and gives a reference for that quote to C. Cahier, Caractéristiques des saints dans l’art populaire, Paris, 1867, vol. i.  He adds that:

Its earliest record is said to be that in the French life of St. Nicholas by Wace. With the incident in the story, Wace connects the great honor paid to St. Nicholas by schoolboys. “Because,” says Wace, “he did such honor to schoolboys, they celebrate this day [Dec. 6] by reading and singing and reciting the miracles of St. Nicholas.”

Wace was a Norman poet, who wrote a Life of St Nicholas in French verse, drawing upon two versions of the Life by John the Deacon, and adding seven episodes which seem to come from popular legends of the time.  The story of the Three Boys appears as verses 213-226.  There is in fact an edition, study and translation of this text in English by Jean Blacker and friends, with a Google Books preview.[3]  I was only able to see the French text, which begins “Tres clercs alouent a escole.” (p.284)  Fredell (below) gives the text as follows:

Treis clercs alouent a escole.
– N’en ferai mie grant parole. –
Li ostes par nuit les occist,
Les cors mussat, I’aver en prist. (216)
Seint Nicholas par Deu le sout,
Sempres fu la si cum Deu plout.
Les clercs a l’oste demandat,
Nes pout celer si les mustrat.  (220)
Seint Nicholas par sa preere
Mist les almes le cors arere.
Pur ceo qu’as clercs fit cel honur
Funt li clers la fest a son jur  (224)
De ben lire et ben chanter
Et des miracles reciter.

Unfortunately the preview breaks off, and does not give the English on p.285.

From the prefatory material I learn that the miracle is not found in any of the early Latin prose texts either.  It does appear in Latin hymns dating from the eleventh century and from three extant rhymed versions of the legend that predate Wace.  It also appears in a Latin play preserved in the Fleury playbook.  These details the editors obtained from the most recent edition, that of Einar Ronsjö, pp.42-45, although this is inaccessible to me.[4]  There are 5 manuscripts, the earliest, A (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 3516, f. 69v-73v), dating to 1267 or 1268.

Wace states that his poem is an adaptation of one or more Latin texts.  The main source was the Life written by John the Deacon in Naples ca. 880, which exists in two different versions, the original and an interpolated version.  The first of these was that printed in 1479 by Boninus Mombritius in his Vitae sanctorum. This was Wace’s main source.  But he seems also to have known another version, interpolated with extra episodes, which was printed by Falconius in the S. Nicolai acta primigenia in 1751.  There is also a Latin version that fuses both, which appears in 11th century manuscript Paris, BNF, lat. 5607.

The most useful article that can be readily accessed is Joel Fredell’s account, “The Three Clerks and St. Nicholas in Medieval England”.[5]  Fredell tells us that “The Three Clerks”, a Latin drama from ca. 1100 found in British Library Additional 2241, apparently from Hildesheim in Germany.  He also summarises the various versions of the story:

In its simplest form, in Wace’s c. 1150 Life, three clerks on their way to school stop at an inn; they are murdered by the innkeeper for their traveling money. St. Nicholas then appears and resurrects the students. Wace’s version of the tale only briefly covers the murder, concentrating on the resurrection for much of its fourteen lines.

The roughly contemporary Fleury version adds a number of details not seen in Wace or any earlier extant sources. Here a scheming wife urges her husband to murder the clerks, and Nicholas pretends to be a customer demanding “fresh meat” – a strategy which leads to the discovery of the murder and the couple crying miserere to Nicholas. The revived clerks pray to St. Nicholas before singing a Te Deum to close.

This play in fact seems to conflate the Three Clerks murder/resurrection with another “apocryphal” episode in the life of Nicholas also known primarily from Wace: the Murdered Merchant. A merchant goes on pilgrimage, loaded with offerings, to a shrine to St. Nicholas. A wicked innkeeper murders the merchant for his wealth, cuts up the body, and salts it down in a pickling vat. St. Nicholas resurrects the merchant in the night, who greets the astonished innkeeper in the morning and convinces the latter to atone for his crime by coming along to the shrine of St. Nicholas and asking for mercy.

The Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 779 MS of the SEL [=Southern English Legendary] (before 1450) seems to contain the crowning development of the Clerk/Merchant fusion of meat, mercy, and meretricious wife found in the Fleury play-book. The Three Clerks here is a 99-line episode at the end of the life of Nicholas. The innkeeper has become a butcher who, in response to his wife’s suggestion that they can profit from the clerks as guests, offers lodging and then murders them. When the butcher discovers that the clerks are penniless, the wife suggests grinding and salting the bodies, using the meat for pies and pasties to sell in order to make something out of the murder. The butcher obligingly grinds up the students and salts them down in a pickling tub. Nicholas appears as the couple are hawking the pies and pasties, asks for “clean meat,” forces the couple to take him to the salting tub where they kneel and beg forgiveness, and raises up the reconstituted students from their pickle. The clerks close the episode with a prayer to St. Nicholas and a shortened vernacular Te Deum.

The slightly earlier version in Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Trinity College MS 605 (c. 1400) disposes of the episode in six lines, placing the students in a vat simmering under a brown sauce, from which St. Nicholas saves them with no dialogue, pleas, or prayers.9

This latter version is preceded by a longer episode also found in Wace and subsequently rare in the written canon of Nicholas’s life, but documented in stained glass and painting. When the boy Nicholas is to be ordained bishop of Myra, his landlady is so excited to view the ordination that she leaves her baby in bathwater over a fire. When she returns the baby is playing with the simmering bubbles, his “cors tendre et nu” miraculously unharmed; the grateful mother gives full credit to the saintly intervention of Nicholas

Fredell states that the miracle may have been “official” in France, but apocryphal in England!

A depiction of the three schoolboys in the cask at Barefreston Church in Kent.

From all this I think we may infer that the story arose in Normandy in the early 11th century, as a folk-story, and went on to massive artistic success.  Curiously there is even a retelling by Balzac, Les trois clercs de sainct Nicholas.

Let’s finish with a couple of images of the story, from English churches.

From Oakley in Suffolk
From Horstead in Norfolk.
Historiated initial ‘D'(e) depicting St Nicholas resurrecting three murdered children from a pickling vat at the beginning of the reading for 6 December. Stowe 12; ‘The Stowe Breviary’; England, E. (Norwich); between 1322 & 1325; f.225r . Via Twitter
Full page from Stowe Breviary.

I also found an 11th c. manuscript, Paris, BNF lat. 18303, online here containing the life and miracles of St Nicholas.

Share
  1. [1]Fredell, p.181.↩
  2. [2]George H. McKnight, St. Nicholas: His Legend and His Role in the Christmas Celebration and Other Popular Customs, Putnam (1919).  Online at Archive.org, and also at Project Gutenberg.↩
  3. [3]Wace, The Hagiographical Works: The <i>Conception Nostre Dame</i> and the Lives of St Margaret and St Nicholas. Translated with introduction and notes by Jean Blacker, Glyn S. Burgess, Amy V. Ogden with the original texts included, Brill (2013).  Preview here.  Manuscripts p.237. Outline of the story episodes p.241. Notes on p.347.  Also see Le Saux, A companion to Wace, 2005, p.51 f for an extended discussion of the St Nicholas piece.↩
  4. [4]Einar Ronsjö, La Vie de saint Nicolas, par Wace, poème religieux du XIIe siècle, publié d’après tous les manuscrits, Études Romanes de Lund, 5 (Lund: Gleerup; Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1942).↩
  5. [5]J. Fredell, “The Three Clerks and St. Nicholas in Medieval England”, Studies in Philology 92, 181-202. JSTOR.↩

“John the deacon” – just who was he?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There are several Italian authors of the Dark Ages known loosely as John the Deacon, and a google search will quickly find evidence that people get confused.  The text that I am working on, BHL 6104, is a Life of St Nicholas of Myra, in Latin, translated by “John the Deacon”.  I struggled with this, so I thought that these notes might help someone!

The first place to look is the Clavis Scriptorum Latinorum Medii Aevi Italiae (700-1000), or SCLMAI, edited by B. Valtorta and published by Sismel in Florence in 2006 in one volume.  This lists most of the following figures, all of whom left literary works, under the name of “John” or “Giovani”, some of whom are relevant, and I’ve added some notes under each.

  • Iohannes Aretinus, episcopus = Bishop John of Arezzo.

Bishop of Arezzo in the second half of the 9th century.  In 875 at the request of Pope John VIII he was part of a mission of Charles the Bald to invite him to Rome for consecration.  In July 877 he participated in a council in Ravenna called by the same pope.  He died in the summer of 900.  Author of a Latin translation of a Greek text on the ascension of Mary.

  • Iohannes Canaparius, monachus.

A monk in the monastery of Sts Boniface and Alexius on the Aventine in Rome and author of the Miracula s. Alexii.  Became abbot in 1002, and probably knew St Adalbert of Prague during his stay in Rome.  Died 1004.  Author of the Passio S. Adaberti martyris Christi.

  • Iohannes Casinensis, monachus = John of Montecassino = John the Monk (of Montecassino).  9th century.

The CSLMAI says that nothing is known of him, except that he lived at the end of the 10th c., and wrote a Passio S. Iohannis martyris.

Articles at Treccani say: John the Deacon (or John of Montecassino, or Giovanni Imonide, latin Iohannes Hymonides). – Monk of Montecassino, historian (b. ca. 852 – d. before 882). Influential at the curia of John VIII, friend of Anastasius Bibliothecarius, he composed from archival material one of the best lives of Gregory the Great. It is very likely that he was involved with the Liber pontificalis; more questionable is the attribution to him of other works, among which the so-called Cena Cypriani.  (This short note from Treccani; a much longer article with bibliography by Paolo Chiesa is here).

  • Iohannes Cluniacensis, monachus (Salernitanus) = John of Cluny, or John of Salerno = John the Monk (of Cluny / Salerno).  Also Iohannes Romanus; Iohannes Italus (!)

Born in Italy, probably in Rome, he met Odo of Cluny in 938 and became a monk.  Two years later he accompanied Odo to Rome, where he was later appointed prior of the monastery of St. Paul.  In 943 he moved to Salerno where he composed the Life of Odo, who had died in Nov. 18, 942.  Author of Sententiae Morales super Iob, and Vita S. Odonis Abbatis.

  • Iohannes Hymmonides Romanus, diaconus = John Hymmonides, or John Romanus = John the Deacon (of Rome).

The SCLMAI : Born around 825, a deacon of the church of Rome.  After the death of Pope Nicholas I (Nov. 867) he was exiled by the emperor Ludovicus II.  He became part of the entourage of Pope John VIII, and was connected to Anastasius Bibliothecarius and Gauderico di Velletri.  He planned (in vain) to continue the Historia Tripartita of Cassiodorus, and Anastasius Bibliothecarius trabslated a Greek Chronographia Tripartita to assist him.  He died around 880, certainly before 882.  He might be the author of the life of Pope Hadrian II contained in the Liber Pontificalis.  Author of the Cena Cypriani; Vita S. Clementis; Vita S. Gregorii Magni.

The confusion between this man and John of Montecassino is obvious.

  • Iohannes Mediolanensis, presbyter = John of Milan = John the Priest.

8-9th century, hagiographer.  Author of a single work on the Passio of the Virgin Mary.

  • Iohannes Neapolitanus, diaconus (and see also Guarimpotus Neapolitanus) = John of Naples = John the Deacon (of Naples).  9-10th century.  This is undoubtedly our author.

Hagiographer and translator, deacon on the church of S. Gennaro ad Diaconiam (=St Januarius) at Naples.  He was a pupil of the priest Auxilius, active in Naples ca. 896.  In 902 he took part in the translation of the relics of St Severinus to Naples, and in 906 in that of the relics of the martyr Sosius to the monastery of St Severinus of Naples.  His works are characterised in the Neapolitan school of translation from Greek by their extreme freedom and formal elegance.  He may be the same as Guarimpotus Neapolitanus, in which case Guarimpoto would have been his name before ordination.  The date of his death is unknown.  Author of: Acta XL Martyrum Sebastenorum; Acta S. Sosii; Gesta Episcoporum Neapolitanorum; Passio S. Maximi Cumanae; Translatio S. Severini Neapolim; Vita S. Euthymii Abbatis; Vita S. Nicolai.  The Life of St Nicholas was made at the age of 20 or 25 at the exhortation of the monk Athanasius, who may perhaps be identified with the Athanasiuis sent to Misenum with John to look for the relics of St. Sosius.  BHL 611-7 are epitomes of the work.  (SCLMAI; Long article with bibliography by Luigi Andrea Berto at Trecani here)

  • Iohannes Ravennas, archiepiscopus = Archbishop John of Ravenna. died. 929.  Author of 7 works.
  • Iohannes Venetus, diaconus = John the Deacon (of Venice). b. ca.940-945, d. after 1018.  Not in the SCLMAI.

Author of the Chronicon Venetum, the oldest Venetian history.  (Wikipedia article here).

We must also mention one further figure:

  • Guarimpotus Neapolitanus = Guarimpoto of Naples.  9-10th century.

Translator and hagiographer.  It is unclear whether he can be identified with “Guarimpotus Grammaticus”, author of the translation of the sermon of Cosmas Vestitor on the translation of relics of John Chrysostom; likewise with John the deacon of Naples, with whose works the author of the Passio Eustratii has strong stylistic affinities.  The name of Guarimpotus appears only in the prologue of the Passio Eustratii, so all his works are uncertain to some degree.  Author of: a lost Passio S. Blasii (possible remains in BHL 1380-1379, which may instead be by Bonitus Neapolitanus Subdiaconus); Passio S. Eustratii et IV sociorum in Armenia, BHG 646-646a, PG 116, 468-515, made at the request of Athanasius II, bishop of Naples in 875-898; Passio S. Febroniae; Passio S. Petri Alexandrini, BHL 6692-3; Vita S. Athanasii ep. Neapolitani; Translatio S. Athanasii ep. Neapolitani.

Out of these, three figures actually appear as “John the Deacon”; John Hymmonides, John of Naples, and in fact also John of Montecassino.  Following the links reveals that our boy is in fact John of Naples, translator of more than one hagiographical work from Greek.

I also found that searching for “Giovanni Diacono” produced a lot of information and some excellent bibliography.

What I had not realised was that Naples, in the 6th-9th century, was actually part of the Byzantine Empire, as the Duchy of Naples.  Its ruler held the titles of dux and magister militum.  Originally dependent on the exarchate of Ravenna, it transferred to the supervision of the Byzantine governor of Sicily after the fall of Ravenna.  But in practice it was rare for a Byzantine army to appear in Sicily, and Naples therefore remained largely independent.  It was vexed by constant Lombard raids, which devastated the countryside.  At other periods the Byzantine government sent Greek settlers to reinforce the Greek population.  The majority of the people were Latin speaking.  By around 840 the Byzantine rule had dissipated to nothing, and the Duchy ceased to feature the Byzantine emperor on its coins.  All the same, this was a bilingual environment, and there was a school of translations into Latin; including the text that we are concerned with here, the Life of St Nicholas.

Share

Free! Database of manuscripts containing Latin Saint’s Lives – at the Bollandists

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been looking for manuscripts of the “Life” of St Nicholas by John the Deacon.  In the process I have just come across something very useful.

This is the “Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Online” (although it doesn’t contain the BHL info) or Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina manuscripta (BHLms) database.  And … it is free!  You have to enter your name and email address,but then you can do what you want.

It’s hosted at the Société des Bollandistes.  Look under “online resources“.  The direct URL is here.  Click on Recherche, enter your name and email address (why?) and then you are in.

I clicked on “Trouver un texte hagiographique d’après son numéro BHL“, and entered 6104, which is the BHL number for the first part of John the Deacon’s Life.  This led to a page on the text, and then

Liste des manuscrits transmettant ce texte, décrits dans les catalogues des Bollandistes: par fonds ou par siècle.

Clicking on “fonds” – i.e. the libraries that hold the manuscripts – gave me a list ordered by library.  “siècle” gave me an even more useful list, in date order, thereby allowing me to concentrate on the earliest mss.  What I got was this:

Screen grab of the oldest manuscripts of John the deacon’s “Life of St Nicholas”

Note the statement at the top: 121 manuscripts counted in the catalogues published by the Bollandists.  That too is useful information.

The links do not lead to online manuscripts.  So it’s Google time.

Googling for “Chartres manuscrits” led me to a web page.  From this I learned that the Americans bombed Chartres in the war and destroyed half of its manuscripts, and cooked the rest.  But some survive.  A full list is here.  It turned out that the Bollandist “Ms. 68” now has the shelfmark ms.27, and … appears in the list of destroyed manuscripts.  So no luck, then.  The link to the catalogue info for it is here.

Googling for “Orleans manuscrits”, the next item, brought up a website alright: the “Aurelia – Bibliotheque numerique d’Orleans“.  I entered “342” in the search, and, among other cruft, got nothing useful.  I saw one manuscript had leading zeroes, so on a whim I tried 0342. This gave me a picture of a manuscript cover and “Views de saints et Sermons”, 342, Xe, XIe, et XII siecles”.  That looked OK, so I clicked on it and got … catalogue stuff, here.  A bit more experimenting and I found you have to click on the *image* itself.  There are facilities to download the manuscript, but unfortunately someone – a paperpusher, one fears – has limited it to 4 pages at a time.

The Life is supposedly at the start, but the very first page that one sees is damaged.  There are several references to St Nicholas tho.  It looks as if the cover was removed at some point, and the parchment is worn by being coverless for some period.  Turning the page reveals pen trials; turning again reveals a modern list of contents, and then the first page of the text (click to enlarge):

Orleans – manuscript 342, folio 6r. Life of St Nicholas by John the Deacon (BHL 6104)

The note at the top of the page – “Monasterii sancti Benedicti Floriacensi” – tells us that prior to the French revolution the ms. belonged to the Benedictine abbey of Fleury.  So here is yet another manuscript online, although it took a fair bit of clicking to get it.

The Bollandist list of mnuscripts is inevitably incomplete.  I know of other manuscripts of this particular Latin text, thanks to the entry in the Clavis Scriptorum Latinorum Medii Aevi: Italiae volume, which has an entry for John the Deacon / John of Naples, and which was the source that led me to the BHL Online.  But it’s still an invaluable resource.

Recommended.

Share

More on Mombritius, and John the Deacon’s “Life of St Nicholas”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The first collection to be printed of the lives of the saints was issued in Milan in 1477 by Mombritius in two large folio volumes.  These featured forms of the text which differed from subsequent collectors such as Lipomani, Surius and of course the Bollandists.  But the volumes became so rare that two monks of the Solesmenses monastery in 1910 found it worthwhile to produce a fresh edition of it.[1]

In fact the original volumes are now online, here (vol.1) and here (vol.2) thanks to the Bavarian State Library (=Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, BSB).  The latter resource is becoming really invaluable for high-quality PDFs of early books and manuscripts.

Over the last couple of days I have been OCRing the text of the life of St Nicholas found in the 1910 reprint, which I obtained from Archive.org a few days ago.  This I finished this afternoon.  It was interesting to look through it, word by word.  The monks reproduced even the printer’s mistakes – “qni” for “qui”! – although they did mark these with a little superscript “+”.  Likewise they indicated the end of the column and end of the page with “|” and “||” respectively.  I was obliged to read the Latin introduction with some care to determine the meaning of both these codes.

Once I had produced a Word document, I was distracted.  Word complained about the number of spelling errors, and this led me to wonder if there was a Latin language spell-checker for Word.  Indeed there is!   It’s called COL, and may be downloaded for free from here.  It’s not perfect, but it does catch a lot.

But the longer I looked at the Mombritius text, the less I liked it.  The punctuation is weird, the spelling is eccentric, and so forth.  So it looks as if I shall be using  the Falconius edition of 1751 instead, as the base for my translation, but consulting Mombritius.

This is a familar feeling.  We had this with the Life of St Valentine of Terni.  It’s not just a matter of translating a text.  First find your text; and then you find that you must actually make your text yourself, from such pre-critical texts as are around.  For St Valentine I felt obliged to include the text that I had made in order to translate it.  It looks as if I shall be obliged to do the same here for John the Deacon.

This is annoying.  I do not want or need to start editing texts.  That is a quite separate enterprise.  So my texts are not critical texts.  They are simply what I could find, edited to remove annoying errors of spelling and punctuation, to produce a readable Latin text.

At this point I found myself wondering just why the texts of such major saints are not available in modern critical editions.  The St Valentine was only available in the Bollandist edition of 1658 (!) and in a modern critical edition with very odd spelling.

For John the Deacon we are less lucky, as the Bollandists have not managed to produce an edition of his work, despite four centuries of work.  But then four centuries pass easily if you don’t do much in them.  The Bollandists last printed a volume of the Acta Sanctorum in 1940.  That is nearly 80 years ago.  Since then they have only produced a couple of ancillary volumes.  Producing critical texts of the Lives of the Saints is what the Bollandists exist to do.  So what the heck are they doing with their time?  It seems to me that they need a kick up the backside.

Share
  1. [1]These details I owe to a brief review by H. Omont, found in Persee.fr here.↩