Month: September 2025

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Rabbit holes are dangerous things.  As I try to pull together the pieces of the project to translate the Life of St Botolph, I find that some of the basic stuff never got done, because of all the rabbit holes that I went down.

So I never got around to translating BHL 1429, the abbreviated Life made by John of Tynemouth.  I made a Latin text alright; but never did the translation.  So I am doing that now.  It’s actually a good opportunity to revisit some of my translation choices for the full Life (BHL 1428).

I also never got around to making the translation of BHL 1431, the full text of the “translation” of the relics of St Botolph.  So that will be next.

Onwards!

How to locate the “Life” of a specific saint (Botolph) in random early modern breviaries

Posted on by Roger Pearse

While trying to finish up the St. Botolph material, I came across a sentence in a fascinating article about St Botolph in Scandinavia. This referred to Scandinavian breviaries which might contain a “Life” of St. Botolph.  I already knew that a very abbreviated “Life” of St Botolph was to be found in the Schleswig Breviary of 1512.  But now…

The other printed breviaries that have this Vita are Aarhus, Uppsala and Linköping. This means that although the theory that this Vita was  composed in Scandinavia still holds, there is no longer evidence to fix it to Denmark.1

No reference is given.

Where to start?

Luckily there is a splendid website on early printed breviaries in Hungary: Usuarium, A Digital Library and Database for the Study of Latin Liturgical History in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period.  You can search for each town, and it will give you a list of early printed liturgical texts.  It even has online copies, and detailed lists of contents.

I started with the Uppsala breviary (Breviarium Upsalense), which can be found here.  This was printed in Stockholm in 1496.  The site also gives a  broad list of contents, which is incredibly handy.  This tells me that the “sanctoral offices” are on pages 453-741.

Looking for Botolph in this vast sea of saints, in no obvious order, in a terrible font, was a nightmare.  I completely failed the first time, retiring hurt, to think and guess again. I had thought initially that it might be in alphabetical order of saint name – it begins with Andrew – but not so.  Then I thought perhaps Saint’s day order, but I couldn’t see it.  Paging through hundreds of pages of hard-to-read text, hoping to spot one small word… was futile.

But I did succeed, so I will share how I did this.  I was able to download a PDF of the whole volume, thankfully, and used my elderly copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 to add bookmarks when I located stuff.

I could see from the website contents that it began with “St Andreas”, i.e. St Andrew.  I googled, and found that St Andrew’s day was Nov. 30.

The orginal volume is unhelpfully without any page or folio numbers.  But the Usuarium site helpfully says that the Sanctoral offices start on p.453 of the PDF/online copy.  So there I went.  Sure enough, St Andrew was there.  I bookmarked this, “Andrew (Nov 30) – 453”.

Next I went to page 741, the end of the sanctoral offices.  Or so Usuarium told me – I could not have determined this myself.  I bookmarked this as “end”.  I then paged back a bit, and found St Katherine.  Back to Google, search “St Catherine Day”. It tells me Nov 25, so I add a third bookmark, “Katherine (Nov 25).

I went back to Andrew, paged down and found… St Barbara (Dec. 4).  Bookmarked that too.  That’s a good start.

So… it looks like the offices are in order of saints’s days.  And the name of the saint is in the fat red text, the rubric.

Botolph is June 17.  So he should be somewhere in the middle.  I picked page 600, and jumped.  Luckily on this page I discovered St Margaret.  Another Google gave me July 20.  Added a bookmark for that, and started paging back, looking up saints as I went.

And… eventually… I found St Botolph, on page 558.

I then located the Aarhus breviary, which had defeated me last night.  It was harder to read, which had not helped.  But the same method worked:

  • Mark the start and end of the sanctoral offices.
  • Add bookmarks for the saints as you find them, with saint’s day, so you can see how far you are through the liturgical year.
  • Do a bit of simple arithmetic to guess which pages are halfway between where you are and what you’re looking for.  Then see if you are too early or too late.
  • Repeat and rinse.

Here it is, on p.548:

I do wish there was someway to feed back my book marks to Usuarium.  One area that the web has NOT solved is collaboration with random strangers.

Some may ask why I didn’t simply use a modern calendar of saints.  The answer is that I couldn’t find one that looked useful!  Probably one exists… somewhere!

Just to round up the search, I found that the Linköping breviary was not at Usuarium.  But google revealed that there was a “Breviarium Lincopense” in 1493.  Indeed it led me to a website Alvin here, which had it online and in PDF, and with a link to the manuscript catalogue with detailed description (on p.125) of the contents.  The breviarium is folios 1v-23r.  The last line of the catalogue informs us that Botolph is on folio 14r.  And the folios are indicated in the download of the PDF!

This is a manuscript, tho.  I’m not looking forward to collating this text *at all*!

All the same, this is simply fabulous.  The raw material of scholarship is just a click or four away… *if* you can find the right search query!

  1. John Toy, “St Botulph: an English saint in Scandinavia”, in M.O.H.Carver (ed.), The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300-1300, York (2003), pp.565-570.[↩]

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve reached the point at which I want to wrap up the many-tentacled texts about St Botolph, and fling the texts and their translations over the wall.  The weather has been lovely lately, but a few days of rain beckon, which would be perfect for the purpose.

It’s funny how stuff disappears, even if you are assiduous in preserving copies of everything.  Yesterday I had an email about a translation of part of Photius which I did more years ago than I can imagine.  So I went looking for PDFs of the photocopies from which I made it.  And… they are vanished.  I scanned the boxes of photocopies into PDF long ago, and they sit on my disk yet, in folders marked “downstairs filing cabinet, upper drawer” and the like.  The filing cabinet is long gone, I should add.  Yet the Photius was nowhere.  I can even remember the pages.  But they are gone.

I spent much of the last two days trying to download a PDF titled “Liturgy of the Hours” from a dubious site.  As such sites do, it throttled the download.  At one point it dropped to 200 *bytes* a second!  It was only a 65mb file, but the download kept failing repeatedly.  Such a waste of time!  I did get it in the end and – inevitably – it turned out to be the wrong book!  That delayed yesterday’s post.

Although I am no gardener, I also spent part of yesterday trying to reseed a portion of my front lawn which had turned to moss.  I’m not winning.  The ground was originally heathland, so basically sand.  Water it, and it forms a thin water-resistant layer, under which the ground remains totally dry.  I don’t know how gardeners remain sane!

Bible Gateway offline in Europe and UK: probably censorship from Ofcom

Posted on by Roger Pearse

British users of BibleGateway.com got an unpleasant surprise last night:

This must be in response to a threat of official action.  And unfortunately, in Britain, such action is a real possibility.

Those in charge of the United Kingdom have passed a law requiring those accessing “adult” material to register their ID and prove their age.  The stated motive is to “protect the children.”

Now I’m all in favour of getting porn off the internet.  But I have never detected the slightest concern about this from those in power, any more than they care about spam.  Nor do I believe that these people care about the children, because the same people have connived at Muslim rape gangs in Rotherham.

So it’s a pretext, and we should ask instead what the likely effect will be.  The effect will be the real motive.

The practical effect of this measure is to end online anonymity, and – importantly – to start a process of state control of who can – and cannot – access the web.  Because if you have to register your ID to access this site or that site, if you have to get approval to use the web for some sites, basically it’s a trivial step, technically, to make this every site.

Who might be responsible?  A little while ago an agency called “Ofcom” wrote a threatening letter to 4Chan, who have applied for protection in the US courts.   So I’d be very suspicious that it was the same people.  Who else would do this?

But who are “Ofcom”?  This was originally a minor department responsible to regulating telecoms companies, but its officials now seem have wide ambitions.  It looks as if Ofcom has sent a threatening letter to Bible Gateway, trying to impose some kind of control on it.  Rather than agree, the US company has simply blocked UK access.  The European Union access seems to be an afterthought here.

But possibly the GDPR regulations come into this.  These were originally an EU measure supposed to ensure big companies did not abuse address and other details of ordinary people.  But I’ve never seen any sign of it being used for that purpose.  Rather it is a means of interference.

We can’t know for sure at this point.  But there seems to be a pattern here of petty bureaucrats trying to do a power grab over the internet.

It won’t work, of course.  There’s no reason why US companies should give some bunch of officials in a foreign country control over their operations.  They will just do what BibleGateway have done, and block the UK and EU, and shove them back into the darkness of the pre-internet era.

Grim stuff.  Why can’t people just leave people alone?

Via Jonathan Black on Twitter.

Updated to rephrase.

Update 26 September 2025: the site has reappeared without explanation.  Let’s hope whatever happened will not recur.

“A virgin, a tree and a death were the symbols of our defeat.” – a Chrysostom quote?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent wrote to me, asking if I knew the source of the following patristic quote.  It is found in many places on the web, in longer or shorter versions, and attributed to Chrysostom, but with no further details.  Here is the fullest version I could find:

Have you seen the wonderful victory? Have you seen the splendid deeds of the Cross? Shall I tell you something still more marvellous? Learn in what way the victory was gained, and you will be even more astonished. For by the very means by which the devil had conquered, by these Christ conquered him; and taking up the weapons with which he had fought, he defeated him.

Listen to how it was done. A virgin, a tree and a death were the symbols of our defeat. The virgin was Eve: she had not yet known man; the tree was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; the death was Adam’s penalty. But behold again a Virgin and a tree and a death, those symbols of defeat, become the symbols of his victory. For in place of Eve there is Mary; in place of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree of the Cross; in place of the death of Adam, the death of Christ.

Do you see him defeated by the very things through which he had conquered? At the foot of the tree the devil overcame Adam; at the foot of the tree of the Cross Christ vanquished the devil. And that first tree sent men to Hades·, this second one calls back even those who had already gone down there. Again, the former tree concealed man already despoiled and stripped; the second tree shows a naked victor on high for all to see. And that earlier death condemned those who were born after it; the second death gives life again to those who were born before it. Who can tell the Lord’s mighty deeds? By death we were made immortal: these are the glorious deeds of the Cross.

Have you understood the victory? Have you grasped how it was wrought? Learn now, how this victory was gained without any sweat or toil of ours. No weapons of ours were stained with blood; our feet did not stand in the front line of battle; we suffered no wounds; witnessed no tumults; and yet we obtained the victory. The battle was the Lord’s, the crown is ours. Since then victory is ours, let us imitate the soldiers, and with joyful voices sing the songs of victory. Let us praise the Lord and say,

Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy victory?
O death, where is thy sting?

The Cross did all these wonderful things for us: the Cross is a war memorial erected against the demons, a sword against sin, the sword with which Christ slew the serpent.  The Cross is the Father’s will, the glory of the Only-begotten, the Spirit’s exultation, the beauty of the angels, the guardian of the Church. Paul glories in the Cross; it is the rampart of the saints, it is the light of the whole world.

My correspondent was unable to find a reference.

After much searching, I found an Opus Dei facebook post, which does give a reference:

FROM THE OFFICE OF READINGS, COMMON OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

To most of us, the words: “office of readings, common of the blessed Virgin Mary” are unintelligible jargon.  Nor does a google search help much.  The persistent will find this site about the “liturgy of the hours”, which is actually what is referred to.  The page has a useful guide to the jargon:

The “Liturgy of the Hours” (a.k.a. “The Divine Office” or “Breviary”) is the daily prayer of the universal Church, with different “hours” prayed at various times of the day and night. It is based primarily on the Psalms, but also incorporates other biblical texts, canticles, hymns, prayers, and even some non-biblical readings. The three “major hours” are Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and the Office of Readings (prayed at any time during the day). Other hours include “Daytime Prayer” and “Night Prayer.”

Basic Terminology:

  • “Ordinary of the Liturgy of the Hours” – the overall structure of the various prayer times, from the Introductory Dialogue to the Final Prayer and Blessing, with various sequences of Hymns, Psalms, Canticles, Antiphons, Readings, Responses, and Prayers in between.
  • “Four-Week Psalter” – the arrangement of the biblical Psalms and Canticles that is used on most days and weeks of the Liturgical Year.
  • “Proper of Seasons” – texts used in the various “seasons” of the liturgical year: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and “Ordinary Time.”
  • “Proper of Saints” – special texts used only on the more important feast days of the Lord Jesus, the Blessed Virgin Mary, or other Saints.
  • “Commons” – additional texts that could be used, mostly on an optional basis, on the feasts and memorials of lesser-known saints

This is rather an alien world, but that’s definitely very helpful.  A bit further on I find that the printed source volume(s) – necessary for reference in print – are:

Liturgy of the Hours. 4 vols. Catholic Book Publishing, 1990. (8160 pages; the official full set for USA)

Even more fortunately another page on the same site listed the “commons” readings here.  A search through this gave me:

John Chrysostom – On the grave and the cross 2 – 3.1646 & 4.1660 – Memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Saturday, alt.

Yes!  The third column is the volume/page number: vol. 3, page 1646, and vol. 4, page 1660.

So this is most likely the source of our translation, and its appearance in various forms on websites is easily explained from its liturgical use.

Unfortunately this mighty – and mighty expensive – volume cannot be downloaded in PDF form for free, as far as I can tell.  So I have not verified the above page numbers.

But there is often more than one way to attack these sorts of questions.  Before I found the Opus Dei reference, I tried a different search which gave interesting results.  Instead of just searching using the first line, I searched for the striking phrase, “A virgin, a tree and a death were the symbols of our defeat”. I saw that one of the results had “A virgin, the timber…” and I thought that this might perhaps be a more original version. That article is here, an article by Fr. Carlos Biestro, “The Enclosed Garden”, in: Mary at the Foot of the Cross – III: Mater Unitatis, (2002) pp.172-222; p.182.

Biestro’s footnote tells us that the source text is Chrysostom, De coemeterio et de cruce (On the grave and the cross), chapter 2, and the Greek text used is PG 49, col. 396 (the complete text is in columns 393-398, and it is also in the Savile edition vol. 5, pp.565-566).

This work  by Chrysostom has the reference number CPG 4337.  A search on the CPG number revealed quite a bit of scholarly activity, including a complete English translation:

David M. Friel, “Chrysostom’s Homily on the Word Koimeterion and on the Cross: A Translation and Commentary,” in: Vigiliae Christianae 76 (2021), pp.1-36. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/15700720-12341486.  Also Academia here.

This 2021 translation is not the origin of the online quotations: that comes from the Liturgy of the Hours in the 1990 version.  The Friel translation gives the same material, with facing text, on pp.12-14, in chapter 2.  The rendering is more stilted and more literal.

Yet another English translation exists online, by John Sanidopoulos, at the Mystagogy Resource Centre: “Homily on the Name ‘Cemetery’ and on the Cross of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ” (29 April 2025).

I did not encounter any translations into other modern languages – Migne will have a modern Latin translation, of course -, but it is a fair assumption that they do exist.

So… the quotation is quite genuine.  But one could wish that more websites also indicated the source!

How do we represent the critical apparatus when we make our critical edition?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My current project, the Latin text of the “Life of St Botolph”, composed around 1100, has reached us in a number of manuscripts, together with abbreviated forms, also in manuscripts, and a couple of early editions.  These are the “witnesses” to the text.

I have now compared the lot, and I have a word document with all the variations.  There are indeed differences in words, mostly accidental.  Only one of these affects the sense, where some idiot copyist in a single late manuscript decided that the people living nearby were Scottish, and introduced the word into the text.  It’s usually fairly obvious what the correct reading is.  It’s fairly straightforward to produce a stemma, a tree-diagram showing what is copied from what, based on those errors and omissions.  This I have done.

But what to put in the notes?  There are about a dozen witnesses.  This means that it is possible to put the whole list of variants into the notes.  That’s not going to be very readable, tho.    The jargon for this is a “positive apparatus.”

Or I could just ignore every manuscript except where it differs from what I have decided the text is.  That will be much shorter.  But it will also be a lot less usable. The jargon for this is a “negative apparatus.”  One manuscript came to hand late, and I can tell you that it helped a *lot* that I knew what every manuscript said, rather just what was different.

Indeed a critical apparatus is not a very readable thing anyway.  So how best to do it?

There are papers on these kinds of questions.  Addressed these issues very well indeed was Sebastien Moureau, “The apparatus criticus” (2015), looking at how to do the apparatus for an Ethiopian text.1  The article is online and recommended.  This assesses the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches.

In particular Moureau points out that the long-established format of classical editions – numbering the lines of the page, with variants by line number at the page foot – is completely impossible to reproduce with any widely-used software.  Here’s a random page from a recent edition of the letters of Isidore of Pelusium, vol. 3:

How on earth do we do that in Word?

Now there is an online course with textbook, M Burghart, Digital Editing of Medieval Texts: A Textbook, online here.  Chapter 4 discusses how to encode the variants in something called TEI.  This is a computer file format.  It’s horrible.

TEI is no doubt possible to learn, but working with tagged text files is horrible.  It imposes a huge initial cost on anyone wishing to adopt this approach.  It’s very error-prone.

However this does introduce an interesting general issue.

Basically in order to do a critical edition, you must need to go through two stages.

  1.  Compile a database, in a structured format. which includes the text and all its variants and any notes upon it, from all the witnesses.
  2.  Present a subset of this information in some other format in your publication.  Possibly even in more than one format for different purposes.

Anyone familiar with modern methods of computer program design will immediately recognise a common computing pattern – pull the presentation layer out of the code, and do it as a separate layer.  Don’t mix it in with the main logic.  Let the logic get the data in whatever way is useful and reasonable; and then pass that to the front end to display in whatever way is useful.  The two sections of the program can be developed separately. and if you need to change the output format, or the on-screen appearance, you don’t have to change every part of the program.

The Burghart paper does indicate that TEI (the database, essentially) can be used in this way, to generate different outputs.

But creating a file/database encoded in TEI means doing things in text files.  That’s very error-prone at the best of times.  TEI is just a format.  What is needed is some “casual casual easy thing,” some bit of software that stores what you put in in TEI, and redisplays it in an easy way.   I know people have attempted this, but the results that I have seen look awful.

Is there a tech billionaire in the house?

TEI is a very tech-heavy approach, that imposes a lot of pain upfront for no gain.  It gets in the way.  I can’t face doing it, and I’m a former programmer!  In Word on the other hand I can just start, and get on with what I want to do.  But I’m then stuck.  There’s no easy way to transform the output into some other format, say from positive to negative or back again.

I’ve no idea what the answer is.  In the meantime we’re stuck with Word.

For the New Testament, where there are thousands of witnesses, and stemmatics does not work, the apparatus is always presented negatively.  Indeed in the Nestle-Aland edition, special symbols are introduced, known as “critical sigla”, indicating insertion and omission etc.  These are supported by special Greek fonts, such as Gentium.  I found an article online by Brent Nongbri here, describing them:

Um… yuk.  I’ve not seen any classical text use these, however.  This again is a presentation-layer thing, designed to reduce the amount of gunk at the bottom of the page, at the expense of intelligibility.  Here’s a page of Jude, using these techniques.

That’s pretty awful, and only gives a tiny amount of data.

So there’s a world of pain here, for something that ought to be simple and an activity that is carried out in universities around the world.

In the meantime, I will stick with Word, and, since it is possible for me to give a positive apparatus, I will!

  1. Sébastien Moureau, “The Apparatus Criticus,” In: Edd.: Alessandro Bausi, &c., Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction, Tredition : Hamburg (2015), p. 348-352 http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/155652[↩]