Some much-needed and long-delayed holiday time with my girlfriend this week! I had booked two rooms in the Holiday Inn Express in Shrewsbury, England, mainly because it had air-conditioning. As is often the case with this chain, the air-conditioning proved to be excellent in the rooms, and it nicely tempered the searing heat. I was truly grateful that I had not booked a cottage!
From the car park at the front of the hotel, the view was dominated by the mass of the Wrekin hill, which loomed over the landscape. The mornings were spent in visits to friends who had moved to the area – house-prices are relatively low – and the afternoons were spent flat on our beds, recovering.
I had noted that the Roman city of Wroxeter, ancient Viriconium, was about 5 miles away from the hotel, down a lane, and to it I duly went one afternoon. The massive wall of the bath-house is the dominating feature of the site.
The opening in the middle originally featured a pair of massive doors, which led into the frigidarium. This wall was the main entrance to the baths, and was constructed more substantially, which is perhaps why it has survived. The hypocausts for the hot room are well-preserved also.
Almost as interesting on that afternoon was the discovery that the site shop had a freezer. In this resided a number of flavours of ice-cream, including a “magnum”. This ice-cream accompanied me as I walked around the site.
The weather was too hot to do much with Shrewsbury itself, and the lack of air-conditioning in shops was remarkable. The result was that my visit to the town was quickly cut short. But I think that I will return, and explore further.
An interesting email has reached me, noticing that work seems to have resumed at Google Books:
I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but Google Books has been adding new material this year from a number of university libraries that have entered their partnership program. As could be expected, the [most likely] reason is that they are desperate to get more printed material to train their LLMs, and libraries are happy if big corporations put up the money and resources to scan their collections. Here’s a very recent article about digitization at Delaware University.
Lately I have seen many books I couldn’t find before with digitization date from around [last April], from Oxford and other places….
This seems entirely plausible, and also good news in a way.
It’s been known for a while that some AI companies are scanning books. An “AI” system seems to be basically a search engine with a chatbot on the front, which is why Google panicked when AI came along. It’s the same market. Naturally the search engine has to be populated somehow. They call it “training an LLM”, in order to obfusticate the violations of copyright, but in truth it seems to be something as simple as populating the database or “model” with the data to be searched. In this case, all the books in the world.
I’d rather have access to the books than whatever an AI engine spits out of them, tho.
The 1597 edition of the Opera Omnia of Tertullian, edited by Franciscus Junius, is one of the rarer early editions. A few days ago, I learned that there was a copy at the Tresoar library in Frisia, in the Netherlands, shelf-mark “F 1532”. The volume has a clear stamp showing that at one point it belonged the library of the King’s Inns, in Dublin.
The four Inns of Court in London are professional associations, which every barrister must join in order to practice, and which provide various facilities for the legal profession. But Dublin did and does possess its own inn of court, the King’s Inns, which fulfils a similar role in the Irish legal system. This was established in 1541, and is an important part of the cultural heritage of Ireland. In particular it built up a valuable general library of antiquarian books and maps, including incunables, only a portion of which were related to the law. But much of it was of crucial importance for Irish heritage and cultural identity. Often the book was the only copy in the country, in some cases almost the only copy known to exist.
In 1971, however, something strange happened. The King’s Inns was in serious financial difficulty. This had been made worse by spending significant sums on its catering arrangements. The ruling council of King’s Inns, the “benchers”, had to do something. So what they decided to do was to sell those books in the library which were not related to the law, books “under the classification of scientific, religious and geographical.”
As news of the proposed sale drifted out into the library community in Ireland, concerns began to appear, and increasing numbers of questions were asked. Scenting trouble, the then Irish Prime Minister obtained a promise from the benchers not to sell books which contained “any reference to Ireland.” 1 The barristers themselves began to ask questions about what was happening. But Sotheby’s were instructed, and duly proceeded to remove all the books. Shockingly it seems that the benchers did not even pay very much attention to just which books were removed. A short hand list existed of a few hundred volumes, but this was only a fraction of what was removed:
It is clear that, as the van from Sotheby’s drove down Henrietta Street laden with some 7,000 volumes comprising almost three thousand titles, nobody at King’s Inns knew exactly which books had gone from the society’s library. Not even Sotheby’s had a list.2
Inevitably this meant that a number of valuable legal books were also taken, as well as books clearly of cultural importance. Around 90,000 volumes were left, about 50% of which are non-legal.
Despite frantic attempts by Irish libraries to rescue at least some of the books, this collection was disposed of in 1972 in three sales, raising a total of £138,975 for the King’s Inns, plus a commission of approximately £24,000 going to Sothebys. 3 In modern money this would be approximately £2.38m and £411k. In these days, when the expenditure of a few million pounds is almost petty cash, the income from the sale seems very paltry compared to the damage that it did to Ireland. 4
Title page of the Sothebys catalogue of the King’s Inns sale, 20 November 1972.
Exciting news for those with rather more money than myself – a two foot (67 cms) tall statue of Cautes, one of the torch-bearers (“dadophores”), the attendants of Mithras, is up for sale at the Interencheres sale “From Caesar to Caesar” in Monte Carlo on the 8th August 2026. The lot is here on the auction house website. Here’s one of the images:
The inscription is “Hymnus inbicto” (for “invicto”), “Hymnus (gives this) to the unconquered (god)”.
The estimate is 30,000 euros – about $34,000 – although of course it will undoubtedly go for more, and the auction house commission and the tax add 30%.
The item must have come originally from a Mithraeum somewhere. It’s immediate origin is from a “French private collection”. Earlier restorations indicate 18-19th century work.
The website tells us that it was published in F. Cumont, Textes et Monuments figurés relatifs aux Mystères de Mithra, vol. 2 (1898). The inscription is no 162 (on p.122), who gave its origin as from Capena. It’s in CIL XI, 3865. In Cumont the monument is no. 105 (on p.260):
*105. CAPENA. Statue de marbre blanc [H. Om,65] trouvée au commencement de ce siècle à Turrita. Aujourd’hui au même lieu dans la maison de M. Trasi.
Décrite: Tomasetti, Archivio della società Romana di storia patria, VII(1894), p. 420, n° 1, cf. CIL. XI,3865.
The CIMRM reference is 645 and 646, in Etruria, with location instead as “Torrita”:
645
Marble statue (H. 0.65), found at Torrita near Nazzano in the beginning of the 19th century. Formerly in Trasi’s house at Torrita, now at Rome (Tomasetti) but I do not know where.
Tomasetti in Arch. Storia Patria VII, 1884, 420 n. 1; Campagna Romana, III, 328f; MMM II 260 No. 105; Taylor, Cults Etr., 58.
Standing torchbearer in Phrygian cap, tunica, cloak and anaxyrides. In the l.h. (broken off) a torch; the rh. is missing. On the base beside the r. foot an inscription:
I’ve not had time to read this preface as yet. But by coincidence I learned today that those parchment pages have just been digitised and indeed uploaded to the Vatican website. The Vatican collection is being thoroughly turned into digital copies, and of course this includes the Vatican Borgia collection. After Cardinal Borgia’s death his collection of Coptic manuscripts was divided into two halves. The first, containing mainly biblical texts, ended up in the Vatican. The rest went to Naples.
Twenty-five manuscripts were digitized the past week, unusually for the Vatican, the majority of these were uploaded on Sunday. Most of the manuscripts this week, twenty-two, came from Borg.Copt. The last three manuscripts came from. Barb.lat, giving two, and one volume only from Ott.lat. It is not clear if this is the start of a new pattern in digitization work, or an outlier week.
To the right is f.11v from Borg.copt.109.cass.XXVII.fasc.141, a 9th Century Sahidic copy of The Acts and Martyrdom of St. Coluthus. First a note about the shelfmarks and the identification: Borg.Copt.109 is a collection of approx. 168 disbound leaves and partial manuscripts. They are shelved in 29 boxes, marked as “Cass” in the shelfmark, but numbered sequentially. Thus cass.XVII.fasc.141 is number 141 of the entire collection, and found in box 27. These were originally catalogued by Georgio Zoega1 in the early 19th C, and then there is a later catalogue/concordance between his catalogue and the current organization found in
J.-M. Sauget, “Introduction historique et notes bibliographiques au catalogue de Zoega,” _Museon 85_ (1972) pp. 25-63.
This particular manuscript was originally catalogued as being from the 4th century, but later scholarship points to it being a 9th C copy, carefully imitating a 4th C hand, which was known to be practiced at the White Monastery at that time.
Csaba Szabó, Mithras in Roman Dacia: Local Appropriations of a Universal God. Cambridge Scholars (2026). ISBN13: 978-1-0364-7770-7.
Blurb:
The Roman cult of Mithras ranks among the ancient religious traditions that have left some of the most striking archaeological remains in Central and Eastern Europe. This volume examines the epigraphic and figurative evidence of the Roman cult of Mithras from the territory of the Roman province of Dacia (modern Romania) through a new and innovative methodology grounded in an interdisciplinary approach. Particular attention is devoted to the centuries-long historiographical tradition of Mithraic scholarship, contemporary developments in the archaeology of religion, and the phenomenon of religious glocalism. Within this framework, Mithras is analysed not merely as a universal and global deity within the religious landscape of the Roman Empire, but also as a glocal divinity actively shaped by local individuals and communities of Dacia.
I’m not sure that “glocal” is a word, but never mind.
Cover:
Likely to be good. Available for pre-order, or so I gather.
I learn today that Brepols have published some new English translations of two works by Tertullian: the Ad Martyras and the De Fuga in Persecutione. Both are translated by Thomas J. Heffernan for the Brepols Library of Christian Sources. The publisher page is here. I’ve added this to the Tertullian Project pages also. That makes the first update since 2023.
Another interesting email reached me from Anne Popkema, at a library of which I had never heard – Tresoar in Frisia, in the Netherlands. It turns out that they hold a rare item – a copy of the 1597 Junius edition of the works of Tertullian, complete with a great number of annotations, and also a letter from Junius’ grandson:
We hold one of the few copies (on the Continent) here at Tresoar, shelfmark F 1532. It was formerly part of the Dublin King’s Inns Library. Parts of it are quite heavily annotated in pencil, in what at first glance seems a late 18C hand to me. Also, we have a letter (5 August 1657) by Francis Junius F.N., a grandchild of Francis Junius the Elder, to Theodorus Saeckma (d. 1666), thanking him for sending him a copy of his grandfather’s commentaries on Tertullian.
Again I have added a note to the Tertullian Project pages.
One of the earliest enthusiasts for Coptic literature was Cardinal Stefano Borgia (1731-1804), a Papal bureaucrat who created a museum in the Borgia Palace in his home town of Velletri. He spent considerable sums acquiring material for it, and especially material from Egypt.
There is a 1781 publication which describes how he obtained some Coptic fragments which we now know to come from the White Monastery in Sohag in middle Egypt. The publication is referenced by Stephen Emmel in his ground-breaking Shenoute’s Literary Corpus, in vol. 1 (2004), p.20 with the bibliography in vol. 2, p.964. The same material appears in other papers, including one by Paola Buzi (online here).1 Buzi gives the reference thus:
GIORGI A., Fragmentum Copticum ex Actis S. Coluthi Martyris Erutum ex Membranis Vetustissimis Saeculi V ac. Latine Redditum, Romae 1781, p. 3-4.
This is not an easy item to find. Indeed at one point I wondered if it even existed. But it does exist, and indeed it is online here.
However it took me two days (!) to locate it, trying various extracts of the title. In the end the search phrase “Fragmentum Copticum ex Actis” produced it, although I am sure that I had tried this before.
But before I located the 1781 publication, I stumbled upon a 1783 reprint in a four-volume series of what we would today call academic papers, publishing previously unpublished primary materials from various libraries. The name of Stefano Borgia appears in several places within it.
The series is titled Anecdota litteraria ex mss. codicibus eruta, published in Rome and edited by Giovanni Cristoforo Amaduzzi and G. L. Bianconi. But reference volumes such as the British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books also reference it under the name of Stefano Borgia.
Volume 4 contains the Fragmentum Copticum. The table of contents (“Elenchus”) on page XII (page 17 of the PDF) gives the “Fragmentum Copticum…” as the second item, on pages 47-229. Page 49 (page 74 of the PDF) features an address to the reader by Stefano Borgia, and the details that we want are on page 50. After this, page 75 has a “monitum” (notice) by “Augustinus Antonius Georgius” – i.e. our friend “Giorgi” about the text, but this does not indicate that he is the author of the remarks.
Attributing this work to “A. Giorgi” is unhelpful, it seems, at least as far as Google is concerned. It is probably better to attribute it to Stefano Borgia.
Title page
Paola Buzi, “The Borgia Coptic manuscripts collection preserved in Naples. A new catalogue,” in Huitième Congres International d’Études Coptes, Paris, 27 giugno – 3 luglio 2004, (Paris 2007), pp. 41-50 (online here).[↩]
“An old catalogue from the monastery mentions a text that bears the same headings and has the same sequence of content as our manuscript. It could have served as a model,” the researcher explains. Tornau cannot confirm this assumption with absolute certainty, however, as the entire library holdings of Amelungsborn Monastery were destroyed by fire during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648).
The “old catalogue” in question is the inventory of 1412 of the Cistercian Abbey of Amelungsborn. This takes a little locating.
The inventory is listed in a catalogue of surviving medieval inventories, published by Theodor Gottlieb, Ueber mittelalterliche Bibliotheken (1890 – online here). Amelungsborn is on p.18-19:
The footnote reads:
Im Anniversarienbuch sind 7 Schenkungen von Büchern aufgeführt; dies wird pg. 18 gesagt. – Ferner ist auf einer Seite des Catal. ein Verzeichniss von Büchern mit der Ueberschr.: Hii de Corbeja, (von woher sie nach Dürres Vermuthung zur Abschr. entlehnt waren).
The anniversary book lists seven donations of books; this is mentioned on page 18. Furthermore, on one page of the catalogue, there is a list of books with the heading: “Hii de Corbeja” (from where, according to Dürre’s presumption, they were borrowed for copying).
The inventory of 1412 is preserved, then, in a manuscript, once in the Ducal Library in Wolfenbüttel, today in the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv (NLA) where it has the shelfmark “Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv Wolfenbüttel VII. B. 111.” A monochrome microfilm is online. Each image is two pages: the catalogue is right at the end, on pages 101-105, i.e. images 54-56. Here is the start of it:
Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv Wolfenbüttel VII. B. 111, folio 101r, top (image 54)
The inventory has been printed, but those seeking it may find that it can take a bit of time to locate thanks to a pleasant custom in 19th century German scholarship, whereby the author publishes the article twice under the same title in the same year but with different contents. So it has been here.
The actual article, that contains a transcription of the inventory of 1412, is this:
This may be downloaded from here, and the inventory starts on page 19 thus:
But the unwary or unlucky researcher will search Google for “Dürre Beiträge zur Geschichte der Cistercienserabtei Amelungsborn” or something of the sort and will be presented with this:
H. Dürre, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Cistercienserabtei Amelungsborn”, Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Niedersachsen. 1876
In this volume, Dr Dürre’s article is the fourth, begins on p.179, and ends on 212, omitting the transcription of the inventory altogether. It was only when you start to search for Programm des herzoglichen Gymnasiums zu Holzminden that you will make progress.
Looking at the inventory, the entry for the new sermons is on p.22, line 220 of the printed inventory.
The manuscript:
NLA WO VIII B 111, fol. 103r, column 2, part way down.
So there is the reference explained.
I think we will all be very interested to see the text of Dr Tornau’s discovery in full!
Excellent news from the University of Würzburg, where a researcher has discovered two unknown sermons by St Augustine in a Latin manuscript in Poland! The reporting (by Martin Brandstätter) is unusually good:
One day in 2024, the phone rang for Professor Christian Tornau, a Latinist at the University of Würzburg: An employee of the Bad Doberan Monastery Association in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania asked him to decipher a 12th-century manuscript that originally belonged to Bad Doberan Abbey but is now kept in its daughter monastery, Pelplin, in Poland. The manuscript contained six sermons by the Christian Church Father Augustine of Hippo (354-430).
What initially seemed like a routine philological assignment turned into a discovery: “Two of the six sermons are previously undiscovered writings by Augustine,” Professor Tornau rejoiced at the unexpected find. He is currently working with Professor Dorothea Weber and Dr. Clemens Weidmann from the CSEL series (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum) on an edition of the two Latin sermons. …
The newly discovered sermons deal with the Old Testament story of the Witch of Endor from the First Book of Samuel. “Saul believes himself to be in a hopeless situation shortly before a battle against the Philistines. God does not hear his prayers. He turns to a witch,” explains Tornau. At Saul’s request, she summons the supposed spirit of the deceased prophet Samuel, who foretells his death in battle.
The story raises a theological question: “Why can a necromancer summon the spirit of a prophet? This, in turn, opens up the problem of theodicy: How can an omnipotent God allow this, or is he not truly omnipotent?” the Latinist explained. Theologically, there are two interpretations: Either it must be a case of deception by the witch, or God permitted the summoning to warn Saul of certain death.
The sermons play with these interpretations. “The first sermon was given during the Sunday service and ends with the question of theodicy and its interpretations. Only the second sermon, on the following Wednesday, weighed the options,” Tornau explained. The congregation was thus given a certain degree of freedom to form their own thoughts on the biblical passage. …
There have already been cases in which supposed writings by Augustine turned out to be forgeries. Therefore, the professor of Latin studies proceeded cautiously: He analyzed the text together with the expert Clemens Weidmann, conducted meticulous research, and organized a summer school in Vienna in the autumn of 2025. Twenty other Latinists attended to discuss and verify the authenticity of the text. In the end, everyone agreed: The sermons are genuine.
Reconstructing the transmission history of the sermons proved challenging. “First of all, the creation of such a manuscript in the 12th century is unusual. A copy from the beginning of the 8th or 9th century would be more typical,” says Latinist Tornau. He therefore considers it very likely that the manuscript is based on an earlier version from the Lower Saxon monastery of Amelungsborn.
“An old catalog from the monastery mentions a text that bears the same headings and has the same sequence of content as our manuscript. It could have served as a model,” the researcher explains. Tornau cannot confirm this assumption with absolute certainty, however, as the entire library holdings of Amelungsborn Monastery were destroyed by fire during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648).
The first edition will address the transmission of the texts and contextualize their content and authenticity. “This isn’t a sensational find like the 30 Augustinian writings discovered in Mainz in 1990. But we are supplementing Augustine’s extensive body of work with two further fascinating texts in a critical edition,” Tornau summarizes. The edition is expected to be published by CSEL at the end of 2026.
The article even includes a legible photograph of the first page of the manuscript, and clearly identifies it – a first, in my experience. The red title reads, I think: “Sermones Augustini de phitonissa et de resuscitatione samuelis”, (i.e. de pythonissa…?)
Excerpt from the manuscript (in red): “Augustine’s sermons on the fortune teller and the appearance of Samuel.” Source: Pelplin, Diocesan Library, Codex 114 (195), fol. 14r. (Image: Biblioteka Diecezjalna im. Biskupa Jana Bernarda Szlagi w Pelplinie)
The town of Pelplin originated from the monastery, itself populated by monks from Bad Doberan in Mecklenburg, according to Wikipedia. The Biblioteka Diecezjalna library has a website here, although it does not seem to have any manuscript material online. There is a website for the “Friends of Bad Doberan monastery,” mentioned in the article, here. I was unable to locate a publication of the “old catalogue” of Amelungsborn unfortunately.
It’s very good news, and it will be most interesting to see what Augustine had to say on this curious passage of the bible.
