Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
My apologies. I have just discovered that no emails are being sent from the site. I appreciate all those who took time to comment. I was unaware of this. I am trying to debug the issue.
Update (26 July 2025): I hope that this is now fixed.
Update (28 July 2025): Apologies for the errors on posts with comments. The footnote plugin has not been updated for years, and it seems PHP 8 is a little stricter on variable declaration. I’ve fixed it, I think.
How the days fleet past! Today vanished, waiting around for an engineer to come and upgrade my broadband. Then a trip to take a couple of things to a sick lady, and then waiting for a plumber who never appeared. Of course it is summer, and it seems a waste to be indoors sat in front of a screen.
Last month I had to stop doing everything in order to try to buy a house. In the end I withdrew, after finding that the house needed much more work doing than I had thought. Curiously the agent seemed quite uninterested in my offer to buy, at full price, or my decision not to. I infer that the “sale” was bogus, designed merely to obtain a market valuation. Oh well.
Tis’ the season to be travelling abroad, like Irish monks. Not that I will be going overseas, but I do need to get away, as we all do. I must book something or it just will not happen.
However today I have managed to return to working on Folcard’s “Life of St Botolph,” and I am going through the Latin and English and creating a combined version with notes and apparatus. I’ve started work on chapter 5 today, out of 11. I have a draft translation of the whole thing. But it needs revising against the new critical text.
I am slightly uncomfortably aware that I have been working on Botolph for two years now. That’s ridiculously slow. But thus does life pass.
An interesting email from John Litteral:
I just wanted to let you know that I have started translating the Bible commentaries by Oecumenius. So far I have translated James, 1-2 Peter, and I am starting on the epistles of John now. I plan to do them all, Acts-Jude, and perhaps Revelation, but since that has been translated into English multiple times I may not do Revelation.
I have already published James and 1-2 Peter, and I have put them on Archive for free.
Oecumenius has been my favorite Bible commentator for a long time, so I am excited to be the first to translate his commentaries on the Catholic Epistles and God willing to do Acts and Paul’s epistles.
- Here’s 1-2 Peter commentaries on Archive.org: https://archive.org/
details/1-2-pet-oecumenius - Here’s the James commentary: https://archive.
org/details/oecumeniusarchive
The translations have been made from the Patrologia Graeca text.
Excellent news! Let us hope that the author does still more of the commentaries!
The first sentence of the “Life” of St Botolph reads as follows:
Omnipotentis Dei benignitas, compatiens errori humani generis, quod ab antiquo serpente caelitus concessa denudatum gloria, ignorantiae damnatur tenebris; divitias misericordiae suae in eius restauratione exhibere voluit, ut ad gloriam lucis de qua caecum aberraverat, rediret per lumen quod ei ineffabili gratia administravit.
I.e.
The benevolence of almighty God – compassionate towards the error of the human race, which, having been stripped by the ancient serpent of the glory granted to it by heaven, is condemned to the darkness of ignorance – wished to display the riches of His mercy in the restoration of it, so that (the human race) might return to the glory of the light from which it had blindly strayed, through the Light which He bestowed upon it, by His ineffable grace.
I’ve been staring at that, and wondering how to turn that into English without departing too far from the original.
Suggestions anyone?
Few will be aware that there is actually a society devoted to the study of St Botolph, and the churches dedicated to him. But there is.
The Society of St. Botolph (https://www.botolph.info/) is an association which is free to join. It’s purposes are:
The primary object of the Society is to remember, celebrate and raise the profile of Botolph, Britain’s most important forgotten Saint.
The secondary object is to provide communication, fellowship and a sense of ‘family’ between our relatively small cluster of seventy Botolph’s churches.
It has a regular newsletter, the Botolphian, full of material about Botolph, and the churches that bear his name. Far from being purely superficial, this also contains some serious scholarly research. For instance the April 2022 issue contains a very careful analysis of the sources to determine whether the relics of St Botolph spent a period at Burgh, or at Grundisburgh.
Thankfully the website is archived at Archive.org.
The secretary is D. S. Pepper, who took over from the founder and has run things enthusiastically for the last 12 years. Highly recommended.
Anybody who works with the texts known as the “Lives” of the saints will encounter a volume called the Nova Legenda Angliae (NLA), the “New Legends of England”. First printed in 1516, it consists of a mass of abbreviated “lives” of various saints, in alphabetical order by saint name.
Very often, the author of the NLA is said to be a writer named John Capgrave. This claim is not true, and has been known to be false since 1970. The real author was a man named John of Tynemouth. Yet the false attribution persists, especially online. It seems worth a post to debunk it.
Let’s take this step by step.
In 1516 an English printer in London named Wynkyn de Worde produced a printed volume containing a collection of the lives of the saints. The original edition may be found online at Archive.org here. (The page has the daft title “[Nova lege[n]da Angliae]”.) The book had no title page, but the colophon says “Explicit nova legenda anglie” (“here ends the New Legends of England”), which title it has had ever since. The colophon gives no author, and states frankly that it reprints existing material, but “emended and corrected”. It is best known in a 2 volume “reprint” by Horstmann in 1901, which unfortunately also interleaved material from elsewhere between the “lives.”
From the 16th century onwards, this Nova Legenda Anglie (NLA) was attributed to the prolific 15th century author John Capgrave (1393-1464).
But already in 1970 Peter J. Lucas demonstrated concisely and conclusively that Capgrave could not have any connection to the work. Unfortunately his article in The Library (5th series, vol. 25, pp.1-10: “John Capgrave and the ‘Nova legenda Anglie’: a survey”) is not easily accessed online.
The actual author of the material in the NLA is John, Vicar of Tynemouth, who flourished around 1366.[1] He composed a “Sanctilogium Angliae, Walliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae”, composed of abbreviated lives of the saints. In this work, the “lives” appeared in calendar order, the order of the anniversaries of their date of death or commemoration. This is the same order as we find in the Acta Sanctorum, and for the same reason: liturgical use.
A single manuscript of this work survives, containing 157 “lives.” This is MS British Library Cotton Tiberius E.1, of the 14th century, from St Albans, which was damaged badly in the fire of 1731 and is today in two volumes, (E.1/1, and E.1/2).
At some unknown point the contents of the work were rearranged by some unknown person into alphabetical order, into the order of the names of the saints. This makes it less useful for liturgical purposes, but more useful as a reference volume Three manuscripts of the alphabetical order have survived, containing 148, 151, and 153 lives respectively, and others may have existed. None of these copies indicate any connection to Capgrave.
The NLA is also in alphabetical order. It contains 168 lives. Most early printed books were made by taking some manuscript – usually a late manuscript – and printing it. Most likely this is the source for the NLA: a manuscript of the alphabetical order of John of Tynemouth’s Sanctilogium. Unfortunately the manuscript has not survived.
The NLA also contains a prologue and a colophon. But this prologue cannot be by Capgrave. It refers to the book as “newly printed”; and it also refers to the Fasciculus temporum of Werner Rolevinck, published 1474. Capgrave died in 1464, before printing arrived in England, or the publication of Rolevinck. Yet the writer of the prologue and colophon is claims that the text is his own work, even though he accepts that he makes use of earlier, widely available (“apud plures”) material. In the absence of any other indication, this suggests that the writer was a contemporary of De Worde, perhaps a hack employed by him.
So how did all of this material get attributed to John Capgrave? The answer seems to be the obscurity of John of Tynemouth, the multiple names used for him in the manuscripts of his various works, and simply confusion by 16th century bibliographers – John Leland and John Bale – between two authors both called “John.” Dr Lucas goes through this material concisely but conclusively.
I imagine that the Nova Legenda Angliae will continue to cause confusion. But this is what it is; an early printed edition, from a now lost manuscript, of a work by John of Tynemouth.
Update: 28 July 2025: fixed missing link to 1516 edition.
A very exciting post yesterday on LinkedIn (but visible even if you don’t have an account) from Leonardo Costantini:
Yesterday marked the beginning of a new phase of Digital Humanities applied to manuscript studies.
Imagine a hyperspectral imaging system that weighs 500 grams and gives you instantaneous results, making the post-processing of the images easy and accessible. Its name is ChromaMapper. It’s being developed by PyrOptik Instruments Limited and it will be a gamechanger!
Designed by Dr Mary Stuart, Lecturer at the University of Derby, with the collaboration of Matt Davies and Elizabeth Allen from PyrOptik Instruments Limited, we tested their prototype on the manuscript fragments at the Special Collections of the University of Bristol. Our thanks to Emma Howgill for the kind collaboration.
It has been a mind-blowing experience, and it was so exciting to see the results seconds after the digitisation.
There are no further details, except that the hope is that it should be relatively cheap. The PyrOptik website is here.
This would revolutionise manuscript studies. There must be acres of unsuspected palimpsests out there, reused parchment with an unsuspected lower text.
The 11th century “Life” of St Botolph by Folcard of St Bertin, which is BHL 1428, has reached us in the following medieval manuscripts: (The sigla or abbreviations are by me).
There are three editions:
These other witnesses are a somewhat different version of the text:
I have compared all of these, and, just for fun, I have worked out the following stemma. The earliest manuscripts are at the top.
So how did I get this? From 5 simple features of the text that jump out at you when you compare the text.
Another feature of the text, not shown above, is whether there is a reference to “Scotis”, “the scots”, i.e. Scotland. This appears in the AASS, and also in R, but nowhere else. But it does appear in the abbreviated and rewritten version of the story that appears in the Sleswig Breviary, which must therefore derive from a manuscript in this late part of the stemma.
The NLA is an epitome, so not very related to the full text. But the presence of an abbreviated translatio tells us where it fits in the tree of transmission.
I also compared how often various witnesses disagreed.
and so on.
The introduction of the gloss into otherwise unrelated branches of the tradition must indicate some kind of cross-contamination.
Folcard wrote a biography, with prologue and translatio. This was fed into the liturgical sausage-making machine, ending up as a set of lectiones (readings) for the sanctoral office, the church service read to celebrate the saint on his feast day. So the loss of literary elements, and the presence of liturgical elements will always suggest modification of the text.
J is the prince among these manuscripts because it alone contains the prologue and the translatio. The liturgically useless translatio is still found in the NLA which must therefore derive from J via an abbreviator. H and T are also relatively pure as containing the liturgically useless prologue. Next to go is chapter 1, also liturgically useless. Then the material about Botolph’s brother Adolph, chapters 1-3, is omitted for the same reason, leaving ch 4 as the start. It all makes perfect sense, as the text is transformed into something that can appear in a Sanctilogium, a medieval service book.
This is the second time that I have worked on a Latin text to create a critical text. I have found in both cases that the process of manual comparison gives you something that machine comparison does not. It gives you a feel for the text, and it gives you a feel for the witnesses and the kind of text that they bear. The text starts to become real and alive under your hand. You get a feel for certain witnesses. “Oh yes, it’s gone off on its own again.” After a while certain things just jump out at you. The longer you work on it, the more this happens. The extended period of time that it takes to produce a modern edition is not a vice; it is what the editor needs to do in order to become truly familiar with his text. I really do not see how this process will ever be possible to avoid, or can ever arise purely from machine comparison. Which is food for thought.
A curiously revealing story at Ars Technica (June 25, 2025):
Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models : Company hired Google’s book-scanning chief to cut up and digitize “all the books in the world.”
On Monday, court documents revealed that AI company Anthropic spent millions of dollars physically scanning print books to build Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI—details buried in a copyright ruling on fair use…
… in February 2024, the company hired Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for the Google Books book-scanning project, and tasked him with obtaining “all the books in the world.” …
While destructive scanning is a common practice among some book digitizing operations, Anthropic’s approach was somewhat unusual due to its documented massive scale. By contrast, the Google Books project largely used a patented non-destructive camera process to scan millions of books borrowed from libraries and later returned. ….
The article is well-worth reading for what it reveals about the insides of the AI world. The 32-page court judgement is also interesting itself as it describes what the AI company did, and why. Anthropic made a billion dollars this way.
For AI systems (“large language models”) to work, they have to be populated with high quality text. Unfortunately that all belongs to other people, publishers and the like, who have lawyers. So one way around this is to buy a physical copy of a book, and then store it inside your computer in digital form.
This trick is perfectly legal, or so a court has just ruled. Why? because they legally purchased them, destroyed each copy after use, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them.
Buying used physical books sidestepped licensing entirely while providing the high-quality, professionally edited text that AI models need, and destructive scanning was simply the fastest way to digitize millions of volumes. The company spent “many millions of dollars” on this buying and scanning operation, often purchasing used books in bulk. Next, they stripped books from bindings, cut pages to workable dimensions, scanned them as stacks of pages into PDFs with machine-readable text including covers, then discarded all the paper originals.
The court documents don’t indicate that any rare books were destroyed in this process—Anthropic purchased its books in bulk from major retailers—but archivists long ago established other ways to extract information from paper. For example, The Internet Archive pioneered non-destructive book scanning methods that preserve physical volumes while creating digital copies. And earlier this month, OpenAI and Microsoft announced they’re working with Harvard’s libraries to train AI models on nearly 1 million public domain books dating back to the 15th century—fully digitized but preserved to live another day.
While Harvard carefully preserves 600-year-old manuscripts for AI training, somewhere on Earth sits the discarded remains of millions of books that taught Claude how to juice up your résumé.
I think most of us will feel somewhat appalled at this treatment of books. Clearly the development of AI is straining the US copyright regime.
June 17 is the day on which St Botolph is commemorated in the Roman calendar, so Happy St Botolph’s day to you all.
In honour of the day, I thought that I would post an English translation of the abbreviated “Life”, found in the printed Schleswig Breviary of 1512 (Breviarium Slesvicense). It’s the latest of the late-medieval abbreviations of the “Life”. I’ve put a Word .docx version at the end.
* * * *
1. After the faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ became well-known throughout the world, there was a man worthy in God, named Botolph, descended from the noble lineage of the kings of Scotland, who, when he was pressed to accept the throne after the death of his father,[2] for the love of God not only relinquished the throne, but also his homeland, and journeyed to England. There, he was received with reverence by Edmund, King of England, and not long after, by the command of the same king,[3] he was raised to holy orders.
2. But when he had stayed with the same king for seven years, he petitioned him to grant him a place where he might more freely serve the Lord.[4] The king assigned him a most beautiful place, surrounded on all sides by the streams of a certain river. There he built a church to the honour of God, and began through divine grace to become well-known for many miracles. Now while the man of God was staying there with his disciple, one day a poor man knocked at the door, begging for alms in the name of God.
3. When the holy Father ordered the disciple to give him something, he replied that he had nothing for all their[5] food, except a single loaf of bread: which he ordered to be divided into four parts, and one of them to be given to the poor man. Then what? When three other poor men came, he distributed the three remaining pieces. When the disciple therefore murmured about this, the holy man said, “Do not be troubled, my son, for God is able to give it all back to us again.” Hardly had he finished his words, and behold: four little boats loaded with food and drink were being drawn along the aforementioned river, which Almighty God, through His faithful ones, provided for the holy man.
4. But one day, when he was visited by the aforementioned king, he petitioned for another place to live, because in the first site he was exceedingly pestered by unclean spirits. The king, granting his request, gave him a more suitable place on the River Thames;[6] in which place the man of God built a church in honour of St. Martin. Then, staying in the same place, he began to raise hens, which an eagle from a nearby forest used to come and carry off. But one day, when it had carried off a cockerel, the man of God rebuked[7] it, and it immediately came and placed the cockerel alive at his feet, and then fell down dead.
5. After thirteen years had passed in that place, the ancient enemy[8] came in the form of a snake and inflicted a nasty bite on the man of God. Because of this, he again approached the king to give him another place; who led him far from the sea, into a vast wilderness: where, as he proceeded through thorny places, he came to a certain valley, which had a small stream of water; and the man of God said, “This is the place.”[9] And so in that place given to him by the king, he built two churches, in honour of the apostles Peter and Paul. When these were completed, he went abroad[10] to Rome for the purpose of prayer, to visit the shrines[11] of those same most blessed apostles.
6. Returning from there and bringing with him many relics of the saints, before entering his own cell, he restored sight to a blind girl through his prayers. King Edmund, hearing of the return of the holy man, met him with great joy, and stayed with him for three days. After these things, Botolph, the man of God, passed over to the Lord. His disciples honorably committed his body for burial. Many miracles happen at his tomb, by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be honour and glory forever. Amen.
[1] The Schleswig Breviary is a service book printed in Paris in 1512 at the order of Gotteschalk von Ahlefldt, the last Catholic bishop. Two copies are held in the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen. This text was reprinted in the Acta Sanctorum, with notes by D. Papebroch, which are translated below, prefixed by a, b, c etc. This translation and other notes by Roger Pearse, 2025, and improved by comparison with the unpublished translation of D. G. Dalziel, kindly made available to me by Denis Pepper of the the Society of St Botolph.
[2] a. It seems that this was Eugenius IV, who died in the year 620; nor was the kingdom offered immediately to Botulph, but only after the princes and people were no longer able to tolerate the crimes of his successor Ferquard: so great that it was decided to throw him into prison, in which he later died, say around the year 624. But when Botulph fled, the administration passed to another of the brothers, Donald, who then reigned after Ferquard’s death until the year 646. (See Wikipedia article on Legendary Kings of Scotland – RP)
[3] b. Or rather, the Christian mother of the still pagan king, who took him as her chaplain, and as an instructor in the pious education of her daughters.
[4] c. In order to obtain this more conveniently, I believe he had first persuaded the Queen to send her daughters to one of the Frankish monasteries.
[5] SB actually has “eorum”; but strangely the AASS copy has “corporis,” which would make this “he had nothing for all the food of the body.”
[6] d. This confirms what I have said, that Edmund ruled in Surrey on the right bank of the Thames, and that it was a part of Southern England. Perhaps also the saint was moved to leave the court because he saw that he was wasting his time in trying to lead the king to faith.
[7] Cf. Mark 4:39.
[8] Satan.
[9] [e] Thus far, that is, up to around the year 644, Botulph had lived as a hermit, when it seemed divinely inspired to him to cross over into Gaul, there to be trained in monastic discipline (though this is here omitted) and to visit various monasteries, especially staying at the one where his spiritual daughters, the sisters of the King, resided, who had taken monastic vows. And so he will first have returned around the year 654, advanced in age and now fitted to establish and promote monastic discipline among the South Angles; and from this point begins that opening part of the earlier “Life,” which alone we approve, as written by a near-contemporary.
[10] [f] I would think that this happened after the year 660, suppposing that the saint returned while Edmund was still alive; who (unless the South Angles had different kings from the East Saxons, for which there is no evidence) received as his successor about that year Edelwalch, baptized in 661 (as Alford believes). At that time St. Vitalianus was the Pope of the Roman Church. (This refers to Fr. Michael Alford S.J. (1587-1652), Fides Regia Britannica, sive Annales Ecclesiae Britannicae, Liege (1663). – RP)
[11] “limina”, lit. “thresholds”, but indicating the tombs and basilicas – Niemeyer, “Mediae Latinitas Lexicon Minus.”
Downloads: (Update: I have added in the Latin)
