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 [...]
After my last post, I started looking for evidence of the work of Heidelberg university in digitising Vatican manuscripts. To my astonishment, I found a website for the now vanished library of the abbey of Lorsch! It seems that a team from Heidelberg have been attempting to recreate this Dark Ages library, full of very interesting [...]
Mike Aquilina writes to tell me about a new manuscript digitisation initiative. The BBC has an article on the story: Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries and the Vatican’s Biblioteca Apostolica plan to digitise 1.5 million ancient texts to make them available online. The two libraries announced the four-year project after receiving a £2m award from the Polonsky [...]
Quite by accident I came across the daunting opus by Steven Hijmans, Sol: the sun in the art and religions of Rome, 2009, in which he attempts to classify all the material about “Sol” in the historical record. I must say at once that the book is partially impenetrable to those not deeply involved in [...]
On May 19th I ordered reproductions of two manuscripts of the unpublished Arabic Christian historian al-Makin from the Vatican. I didn’t receive any acknowledgement, so wasn’t expecting much. Anyhow a UPS man arrived a few minutes ago, bearing a parcel. So it took just under 7 weeks to get, from posting the order to now. That’s [...]