I’m still working away at producing an English translation of the “letter 149” attributed falsely to St Jerome, De Solemnitatibus Paschae, (CPL 2278) which probably dates to the 6-7th century.
This evening I ran into trouble with some variations in the Latin text. Now I don’t have access to Walker’s critical edition. I have two editions, that of Migne, based on a Vatican manuscript, and that in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, based on a Paris manuscript. It’s pretty clear that the author knew some Greek, and that he managed to confuse the copyists. What was the blighter actually trying to say?
Well, the text is preserved in seven medieval manuscripts, dating from the 9-12th centuries. Six are held in Oxford in the Bodleian Library; in Paris in the Bibliothèque Nationale Français; in Koln, in the Dombibliothek; in Geneva in the university library; in the Vatican; and in Tours in their Bibliothèque Municipale. To my great surprise, and no little delight, I was able to find digital facsimiles of all of these. That gives a big clue about the text.
The seventh manuscript is – deep breath – held in the British Library in London. Which means, of course, that the chances of accessing images online are basically zero. Their very limited collection of digital manuscripts was zapped back in October 2023, and very little has been done to rectify the position.
This is pretty shameful, when you see the relentless pace of digitisation of medieval manuscripts across Europe.
It made me think of the fire at Notre-Dame in Paris. This was an attack on a national institution in France, and the French government sprang into action. I think they’ve more or less completely restored it now.
The attack on the British Library was also an attack on a national institution. Yet it seems that the British government just shrugged.
In the end, just how hard can it be to photograph pages from medieval books? I’ve done it myself. Probably many of us here do it. Photographers are cheap. Just hire a few and let them crank it out.
Of course there is nothing that a civil servant cannot gold-plate, nothing that a greedy contractor cannot inflate. A massive price could quickly be conjured up by the usual suspects. But Covid proved that capable people do exist who can get things done very rapidly and efficiently through by-passing the senile British civil service. Why not let some of these people get to work on this problem? It is NOT a difficult problem.
I think we’ve all had enough of this collection being essentially offline. This evening I wrote to my Member of Parliament, Jenny Riddell-Carpenter MP, and asked if anything can be done. It’s not much, but it’s something that I can do. She’s a new MP and hopefully not completely ground down by the pressures of parliament.
If any of my readers reside in the UK, perhaps they could write to their MPs also. It couldn’t hurt.
If you don’t live in the UK, your country probably has an ambassador here. Would an email serve a purpose?
UPDATE: It seems that the manuscript I wanted – MS Cotton Caligula A xv – is indeed online already here. I couldn’t find it because, when I searched, I searched for “Cotton Caligula A”, which gave only one result. In fact I needed to search for “Cotton MS Caligula A”. Aargh! But the general point stands.
The British Library needs to update its search engine handling so we can find these things through Google, but that’s secondary.
It really is a tragedy that they have yet to restore the BL manuscript images. I understand they were hacked, but I don’t think the manuscript images were all that important to whoever it was! Surely it can’t be that difficult to just reupload all the previous images and have them accessible again.
I personally want to see the colour photos of Minuscule 700 and Lectionary 184 again – black and white digital microfilm ones just aren’t good enough when there’s colour ones just sitting on a BL harddrive somewhere! 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁
As I understand it – and the details seem maddeningly elusive – it was not just the website that was penetrated, but their whole IT infrastructure, right down to the readers’ cards level. I think it must all have been encrypted for ransom.
The only reason that any of the MSS were restored was because of the project to digitised 1,000 Anglo-Norman mss was done jointly with the French, who kept copies.
I agree about microfilm copies. But I cannot understand why the microfilms are not simply run through scanners, as the French have done.