A few days ago I wrote about locating the 18th century publication of an early Coptic fragments of the acts of St Colluthus. This was important, not for the content, but for the preface explaining how Cardinal Stefano Borgia came to own some parchment pages from the White Monastery at Sohag in Egypt; the first in Europe to do so.
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.
Here’s the BlueSky post by Aaron M., who maintains the Wiglaf website which indexes what has been uploaded. It’s a far, far better way to locate Vatican manuscripts than the official pages. Here’s the post on his blog, “Week 25 of 2026“:
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.
The manuscript itself is at the Vatican website here.
Marvellous!