I’m still pottering around in the Coptic martyrology area, especially with regard to the Great Persecution of the church under Diocletian. I have a translation of another version of the Acts of St Colluthus to upload, although a valueless one. I’ve been looking for the other texts about the same saint – two encomiums – with limited success.
But it is terribly difficult simply to find stuff in Coptic. Today, by accident, I discovered that all the Coptic material about Colluthus has recently been collected and critically edited, with German translation. This is Gesa Schenke, “Das koptisch hagiographische Dossier des Heiligen Kolluthos”, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium volume 450, Louvain: Peeters (2013).
Obviously this is great news: except for two minor details. The first detail is that I did not come across this earlier. I have been googling relentless for some days about Colluthus, and reading books and articles, without ever becoming aware of the existence of this book. I have now added it to the Wikipedia page for St Colluthus, if only to spare others the same experience. With luck this will now bubble up into AI responses.
The other issue is that the book is not online; not even, as far as I can tell, in the pirate libraries which eke out their shadowy existence on the fringes of the web, ever pursued by the agents of the publishing industry. The reason for this is fairly straightforward: it was published by Peeters in the CSCO series.
The CSCO series is vast. I have no idea what it contains, myself, and if I don’t, nobody does. Peeters carry out a marvellous function, in creating this great archive of obscure oriental texts. But I can only imagine that they sell almost exclusively to research libraries that subscribe to the series and don’t care what the price is. Because that single volume is 120 euros, all by itself.
In fairness I suspect that collections of PDFs are circulated among orientalist students. How else could they work? This used to happen with the Sources Chrétiennes series, although it is now some years since any zip file came my way.
I don’t like the idea of depriving the publishers of these series of the revenue from sales. That’s how they fund their work. On the other hand starving students and poverty-stricken pensioners are not going to be able to buy volumes anyway. So we have the situation where PDFs exist and are tolerated, at least to some extent. I have no idea what the answer is.
I could take a day of my life, drive a couple of hours up a road studded with speed cameras to a research library with inadequate parking, locate a copy of Schenke and spend some time at the photocopier with the pages of interest. But I don’t think that I will. All the same, if you want Colluthus texts and translations, Schenke’s volume is the place to look.
The actions during the Diocletianic persecution of the provincial governor of the Thebaid, Satyrus Arianus, look like an interesting subject. A papyrus which I translated in my last post mentioned him. There are apparently others. But it is strangely difficult to locate these things using Google, or even Papyri.info.
In fact this seems to be a general theme with Coptology. Hardly anybody knows anything about it, and, if you try, it’s really hard to find out anything. Oh well.
You might just try asking Gesa Shenke for a copy of the proofs… she’s in Oxford and is an extremely helpful person.
Thank you so much for the tip!