From my diary

I’m working on translating material associated with the council of Hippo in 393.  Not just the Breviarium of the canons, prepared for the council of Carthage in 397; but also a handful of canons that survived in more complete form, more or less by accident, outside of the main flow of canon law transmission.  To do so I work with various tools, including my own QuickLatin tool which I am continuously enhancing with small bits of syntactical information.  But yesterday I had to stop and do some real work on the code base.  I had never implemented code to handle “quidem” and the like, not least because I always know what it means.  But finally this absence annoyed me enough to do something about it.  Two days of hard work later, it is now functioning.

Tomorrow I will get back to working on five canons discovered by Charles Munier in Codex Vercellensi 165, fol. 199, and published in 1968 in the Revue de Droit canonique 12, p.16-29.  This does not seem to be accessible, but he printed the text in his edition of the African canons which I have.  I’m working through the first of these, which restrains clergy from ordaining minors without the permission of their fathers.

The manuscript is at the Biblioteca capitolare in Vercelli; which sounds like the chapter library of the cathedral.  Sadly these do not seem to be online yet; but no doubt they will be one day!

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6 thoughts on “From my diary

  1. You do much more to enriching our cultural heritage than do hordes of careerist academics. You work diligently for no pay and very little credit. Freely we have received, freely you give. May God bless you abundantly!

  2. That’s very kind, but too kind. Our academics do a huge amount and I wouldn’t want to carry the loads that they do. What I do is inspired by the example of Harry Plantinga of CCEL and Bill Thayer of Lacus Curtius among others, who do far more and for far longer.

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