Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
Through the kindness of Pierre Petitmengin, a copy of the Chronica Tertullianea et Cyprianea 2011 has reached me. This bibliography of Latin patristic materials before Nicaea, with short reviews, is published in the Revue d’etudes augustiniennes, which, I learn, has now become the Revue d’etudes augustiniennes et patristiques. So, what was published in the last [...]
A mention in a post at the Theology Archaeology blog drew my attention to the question of the sacrifice of children at Carthage. I think that we all remember that the Carthaginians sacrificed their children to their god. It is, indeed, one of the things we think of, when the word “Carthaginian” is mentioned. But [...]
We all know Franz Cumont’s Textes et Monumentes, which collected all the ancient sources on Mithras known a century ago. What few realise is that a translation was made of most of the literary fragments that he published. It’s A. S. Geden, Select passages illustrating Mithraism. It was published by SPCK in 1925; and since Mr. [...]
Ten years ago I was still scanning material for the Tertullian Project. One thing that I started to do was acquire foreign-language translations. In a way this was a mistake; it was quite hard to scan and proof these, and really those who speak that language group will be far better at it. So after [...]
The great French scholar Pierre Petitmengin has kindly sent me an off-print of the new Chronica Tertullianea et Cyprianea (CTC 2008). This is a list of new publications about Tertullian, Cyprian, and the other ante-Nicene Latin Fathers, with a short review of each. It has long been essential reading for Tertullianists (at whom it was [...]
At the renaissance there was an explosion of copies of manuscripts. These thick neat manuscripts will be familiar to all who have handled manuscripts at all, and are found everywhere. Fifteenth century copies are commonplace. I’ve just been reading Emil Kroymann’s study of the transmission of the text of Tertullian in Italy, and the role played [...]
There are quite a lot of scattered late Latin poems around, often attached to the works of Cyprian or Tertullian in manuscripts or early editions. Some are interesting. This article discusses them, and I have a bunch on my Tertullian site under “spurious”. One of these is a poem of 85 lines here, which talks [...]
I was interested to discover from this site that apparently more than 7,300 unique individuals used my site last month. For a site dedicated to a subject as abtruse as the Fathers, that’s not bad going. Perhaps we underestimate interest in early Christian history?