Searching for “Giorgi Fragmentum Copticum”

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stumbled upon a 1783 reprint in a four-volume series of what we would today call academic papers, publishing previously unpublished primary materials from various libraries.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.

The series volumes may be found here:

• Volume I – 1773.
• Volume II – 1773.
• Volume III – 1773.
• Volume IV – 1783.

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.

1. 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).[↩]