Author: Roger Pearse

More on John the Lydian

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I spent a bit of time this evening with the 1898 edition of John the Lydian, De mensibus, which I got from Google books.  There is no table of contents, so I opened it in Adobe Acrobat pro and went through adding bookmarks. 

The result was as follows.  It’s far more useful as a guide to the work, and made me realise how book 4 is actually the largest portion of the work, larger than books 1-3 together.  Getting a translation of book 1 (18 pages) will cost less than I paid for the March section of book 4 (23 pages).

It’s worth considering that it was a worthwhile exercise, just to edit this PDF in this fashion.  I shall also OCR the praefatio, so that I can have the assistance of automated translation tools in trying to come to grips with the transmission of the text.

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Getting John the Lydian into English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The 6th century antiquarian John the Lydian has left us three works, all of great interest for the light they shed on Roman customs.  Most interesting of these, to me at least, is De mensibus — On the Roman months.  This is in 4 books, and the fourth book walks us through the year, detailing the festivals and annual events.  But it has never been translated into English.

This morning I’ve emailed a friend and commissioned him to translate September, and perhaps October.  He’s already done March, some time back, and part of December.  September, October and November are all short, and it will be nice to have them in English.

UPDATE: The March portion was announced here.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Very busy with ‘real life’ at the moment, so I’m in no position to make progress with any of my projects. 

Someone suggested that I do a kindle version of the Eusebius book, containing only the translation of the Gospel Problems and Solutions.  Helpfully he offered advice on how to make the thing.  I will certainly consider this at some point.

At the weekend I found myself in a newsagent with quite a book selection.  I came out with a book from a series of historical novels, about a couple of chaps in the 1st century army.  The book was Simon Scarrow, The Legion, and was set in Egypt.  I read it over the weekend.

In honesty it was a disappointment to me.  It was professionally written, but there was almost no atmosphere to the book.  When the scene shifted, I hardly noticed.  There was no scenery, no sense that we were in pharonic Egypt — just the narrative, just the adventures.  In fact this was so much the case that I wondered whether you could turn it into a ‘Western’ novel about the US cavalry, simply by doing some global search-and-replace on names, locations, weapons, etc.  I really felt  that you could!  It was pleasant enough but it went straight to my “out” pile for disposal. 

I noticed, in the same shop, that fantasy and horror were now shelved as interchangeable.  I don’t want horror and misery as entertainment, thanks — I get plenty of that from my boss! — and the two genres used to be very distinct.  I suspect it marks the decline of fantasy, in truth.   I can’t remember the last time I saw an innovative fantasy novel.

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Islamic medical manuscripts now online at the Wellcome trust

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent directs my attention to an announcement by the Wellcome Trust.

Arabic medicine was once the most advanced in the world, and now digital facsimiles of some of its most important texts have been made freely available online. The unique online resource, based on the Wellcome Library’s Arabic manuscript collection, includes well-known medical texts by famous practitioners (such as Avicenna, Ibn al-Quff, and Ibn an-Nafis), lesser-known works by anonymous physicians and rare or unique copies, such as Averroes’ commentaries on Avicenna’s medical poetry.

Curiously the manuscripts are hosted in Egypt, at the new Library of Alexandria site.  The “Browse and find” reveals 121 manuscripts.  I did a search on “Ibn Abi”. I was looking for Ibn Abi Usaibia, but the last name is spelled so variously that I had no hope of locating it thereby.  I find that an ms. of this work does exist, WMS Arabic 432 and 433.

A very welcome discovery indeed.

Interestingly you can download PDF’s of manuscripts, at least in principle.  This is very welcome!  It is far easier to work with a local PDF than remotely.  But on my first attempt I couldn’t get the “all  images as PDF” to work.

So I tried again in Firefox, for just a single page, and it tried to open something in a new tab, which was blank.  Then I reconfigured Firefox; in the Options, Applications, for Adobe Acrobat documents I changed the Action to “Save file”.  When I pressed to download a page, it saved something with file name “pdf” (that’s the entire file name!) in my download directory.  Renaming it to 1.pdf and double-clicking on the file brought up the image. 

Retrying with “all images as PDF” still didn’t do anything.  I just left Firefox open and went off to work on something else, and eventually it opened the download window — again it named the download file “pdf”.  So patience is required, it seems.  And they need to fix that filename issue.

Of course if this is how the Wellcome Library stuff is being made available at the Library of Alexandria, possibly there are more mss for download available!

UPDATE: I note that 432 is not online.  So not all the mss are available.

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An unintentionally humorous passage in Ibn Abi Usaibia

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The following passage in the dictionary of medical writers by the 13th century Islamic writer Ibn Abi Usaibia made me chuckle.

The physicians of note who lived in the time between Hippocrates and Galen, apart from Hippocrates’ own pupils and his sons, were the following: S . . . , the commentator on Hippocrates’ books; Ancilaus the physician, Erasistratus II, the dogmatist; Lyco, Milo II, Gallus, Mircaritus, the author of a book on medicaments, Scalus, a commentator on Hippocrates’ works, Mantias, another commentator on Hippocrates’ works, Gallus of Tarentum, Magnus of Emesa, the author of a book on urination, who lived 90 years; Andromachus, who lived 90 years: Abras [?] also known as the “Remote,” Sounachos the Athenian, the author of a book on drugs and pharmacology, and Rufus the Great, who was from the city of Ephesus and was unrivaled his time in the medical art.

Poor Magnus, to be so remembered, from a life of 90 years.

Likewise the unfortunate Abras must have had a rough time at school.  “Pass me the ‘remote’, boy” gains a whole new meaning!

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JSTOR start to make content available to independent scholars

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email has reached me this evening, drawing attention to a change of policy from JSTOR, announced yesterday.

On September 6, 2011, we announced that we are making journal content in JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world.  This “Early Journal Content” includes discourse and scholarship in the arts and humanities, economics and politics, and in mathematics and other sciences.  It includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals. This represents 6% of the content on JSTOR.

While JSTOR currently provides access to scholarly content to people through a growing network of more than 7,000 institutions in 153 countries, we also know there are independent scholars and other people that we are still not reaching in this way.  Making the Early Journal Content freely available is a first step in a larger effort to provide more access options to the content on JSTOR for these individuals.  

The Early Journal Content will be released on a rolling basis beginning today.

Emphasis mine.  At the Oxford Patristics Conference, indeed, there was considerable unhappiness by those independent scholars I met about the lack of access to resources like JSTOR. 

The FAQ’s give some more details.  The following questions explain what is happening, I think:

Why did you decide to make this content freely available?
Our mission involves expanding access to scholarly content as broadly as possible, in ways that are sustainable and consistent with the interests of our publishers who own the rights to the content.  We believe that making Early Journal Content freely available is another step in this process of providing access to knowledge to more people; that we are in a position both to continue preserving this content and making it available to the general public; and this is a set of content for which we are able to make this decision.

Did you do this in reaction to the Swartz and Maxwell situations?
Making the Early Journal Content freely available is something we have planned to do for some time.  It is not a direct reaction to the Swartz and Maxwell situation, but recent events did have an impact on our planning.  We considered carefully whether to accelerate or delay going ahead with our plans, largely out of concern that people might draw incorrect conclusions about our motivations. We also have taken into account that many people care deeply about these issues.  In the end, we decided to press ahead with our plans to make the Early Journal Content available, which we believe is in the best interest of the individuals we are trying to serve and our library and publisher partners.

Yes, well, perhaps.

For those who don’t recall, Gregory Maxwell uploaded 32Gb of JSTOR scientific articles, all published before 1923, to BitTorrent.  He did so as a protest against the obstruction of access to what were public domain materials, in reaction to the arrest of Aaron Swartz in July 2011 for downloading 5 million articles from JSTOR.  Maxwell’s action made JSTOR’s position impossible.

I suspect that JSTOR was blamed for actions forced on it by the publishing industry, who ‘own’ the copyrights to this material, under the over-extensive copyright laws created by … the publishing industry.  And I suspect JSTOR and the publishers had a rather frank discussion.

Perhaps I am over-imaginative, but I suspect that Maxwell gave JSTOR precisely the ammunition it needed to reason with the industry sharks.  “Now look what you made happen!” JSTOR could say, “Now someone has called the bluff.  Are you going to sue him, then?  For uploading out-of-copyright stuff?  For making state-funded scholarship available?  With the world’s journalists watching, and hostile?  Do you want the whole copyright law reviewed, with you plainly morally in the wrong, and perhaps legally in the wrong too?”  I imagine that, faced with that reality, the publishers decided to play safe.

Reading the FAQ, it looks as if even then the European publishers — vermin in human form, many of them — tried to block it, confident of their total control of EU access.  Why else would we get the nonsense of journals only before 1870?  As ever, the non-US reader loses out.

But it is to be welcomed.  JSTOR should indeed be addressing the problem of access by independent scholars.  There is, in truth, still no means for us to access JSTOR.  That is morally wrong.  But this announcement is a small step in the right direction.

Thank you, JSTOR. 

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Materials from the Greek Ephraim

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Dominique Gonnet from the Sources Chretiennes has drawn my attention to a little known Greek Orthodox site, http://www.anastasis.org.uk/.  It is the property of an “Archmandrite Ephrem” and it contains English translations of all sorts of snippets.  In particular there are a  number of letters and sermons by Ephrem the Syrian, translated here.  I think few of these exist in English otherwise.

There are no contact details on the site, and the last date I could find was 2008. 

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The assault on free speech in our time

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I learned that a 65-year old Suffolk woman is to be dragged through the courts for “racially aggravated harassment”.  Her real crime?  To place a golliwog in her window.  She was denounced to the police by a coloured neighbour who has a grudge against her.

Mark Steyn, himself a victim of these thought-crime laws, has written a long but excellent overview of what is going on.  For this is not a trend peculiar to England, but universal throughout the west.  In Gagging us softly he writes:

In this anniversary week, it’s sobering to reflect that one of the more perverse consequences of 9/11 has been a remorseless assault on free speech throughout the west. I regret to say that, in my new book, I predict this trend will only accelerate in the years ahead. …

… the Canadian establishment seems to think it entirely natural that the Canadian state should be in the business of lifetime publication bans, just as the Dutch establishment thinks it entirely natural that the Dutch state should put elected leaders of parliamentary opposition parties on trial for their political platforms, and the French establishment thinks it appropriate for the French state to put novelists on trial for sentiments expressed by fictional characters. Across almost all the Western world apart from America, the state grows ever more comfortable with micro-regulating public discourse—and, in fact, not-so-public discourse: Lars Hedegaard, head of the Danish Free Press Society, has been tried, been acquitted, had his acquittal overruled, and been convicted of “racism” for some remarks about Islam’s treatment of women made (so he thought) in private but taped and released to the world. The Rev. Stephen Boissoin was convicted of the heinous crime of writing a homophobic letter to his local newspaper and was sentenced by Lori Andreachuk, the aggressive social engineer who serves as Alberta’s “human rights” commissar, to a lifetime prohibition on uttering anything “disparaging” about homosexuality ever again in sermons, in newspapers, on radio—or in private e-mails. Note that legal concept: not “illegal” or “hateful,” but merely “disparaging.” Dale McAlpine, a practicing (wait for it) Christian, was handing out leaflets in the English town of Workington and chit-chatting with shoppers when he was arrested on a “public order” charge by Constable Adams, a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community-outreach officer. Mr. McAlpine had been overheard by the officer to observe that homosexuality is a sin. “I’m gay,” said Constable Adams. Well, it’s still a sin, said Mr. McAlpine. So Constable Adams arrested him for causing distress to Con­stable Adams.

In fairness, I should add that Mr. McAlpine was also arrested for causing distress to members of the public more generally, and not just to the aggrieved gay copper. No member of the public actually complained, but, as Constable Adams pointed out, Mr. McAlpine was talking “in a loud voice” that might theoretically have been “overheard by others.” And we can’t have that, can we? So he was fingerprinted, DNA-sampled, and tossed in the cells for seven hours.

…

When you accept that the state has the right to criminalize Holocaust denial, you are conceding an awful lot. I don’t just mean on the specific point: The Weimar Republic was a veritable proto-Trudeaupia of “hate speech” laws. In the 15 years before the Nazis came to power, there were over 200 prosecutions for “anti-Semitic speech” in Germany—and a fat lot of good it did. But more important than the practical uselessness of such laws is the assumption you’re making: You’re accepting that the state, in ruling one opinion out of bounds, will be content to stop there.

As is now clear, it isn’t. Restrictions on freedom of speech undermine the foundations of justice, including the bedrock principle: equality before the law. When it comes to free expression, Britain, Canada, Australia, and Europe are ever less lands of laws and instead lands of men—and women, straights and gays, Muslims and infidels—whose rights before the law vary according to which combination of these various identity groups they belong to.

…

If a Muslim says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, Scotland Yard will investigate him for homophobia; but if a gay says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, Scotland Yard will investigate him for Islamophobia.

Two men say exactly the same thing and they’re investigated for different hate crimes. On the other hand, they could have sung “Kung Fu Fighting” back and forth to each other all day long and it wouldn’t have been a crime unless a couple of Chinese passersby walked in the room.

I don’t even dare comment on some of the arrests of bloggers in the UK recently, I should add. 

Read the whole thing. 

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still full of cold, but I have been trying to get back to the keyboard. In fact I have managed to proof the OCR output for the first chunk — very small chunk! — of Ibn Abi Usaibia, and confirmed to myself that it’s doable.  Working on this, therefore, will be a nice winter project. 

It’s not been too difficult, as there are not a lot of strange characters so far.  The translator has indicated long vowels with an overscore, and some t’s and d’s and s’s with a dot underneath.  I do wonder whether they are all necessary.  Is it really necessary to write “Allah” with an overscore over the second ‘a’?

An email has arrived from my friends at Les éditions du Cerf, confirming that they forgot to purchase from the editor the supposed copyright in the Greek text of the ecloge of Eusebius’ Gospel Problems and Solutions.  So I don’t owe them a royalty for using it in my book.  Not that the royalty was in any way oppressive — they were very decent folk, charged very little, and I highly recommend them to anyone who needs to reprint a text from the Sources Chrétiennes series.  But this scam among academic publishers, of claiming copyright of the original text of a modern edition of some ancient author, is so widespread that they doubtless feel obliged to do the same, and no blame to them.  It seems that Claudio Zamagni, the editor, retains ownership of any putative rights over the Greek text, and I know that he doesn’t believe that such a copyright should morally exist.  I agree with him there, as I have said before.  This also removes any legal obstacle to me placing the whole PDF of the book online when the time comes.  So everyone wins, and I will find some way to make a donation to the SC so they don’t lose out either.

Meanwhile I’m having some interesting times dealing with orders for the book via book-dealers.  One Italian bookshop ordered a copy ages ago, but has yet to pay.  Another Dutch bookshop seems better, but still no cash.  I think that I will go over to the system of requiring payment in advance, for anything else seems to make work and worry.  I’ve posted notices of the appearance of the book in a couple of online fora.

Annoyingly, I’m still too full of cold to sit at my computer much, and I am getting very tired of sitting around.  Isn’t it infuriating to be prevented from doing anything by a miserable cold virus?!  To have millions of useful, interesting and enjoyable things to do, and to feel too unwell to do any of them?  But I am mildly cheered to discover that during his 40’s C. S. Lewis — whose letters I am still reading — changed from having flu once a year to once a term, and started getting lumbago.  “At least I do better than that!” I thought to myself.  I think Lewis became old quite early, and indeed died at age 65 after ten years of illnesses.  In a letter he remarks that in his family this was normal.  Most of us will be more fortunate, I think. 

It is interesting that he allowed the ‘duty’ of correspondence with strangers to occupy so much of his time, after he became known through his broadcast talks on the BBC.  I think that he should probably have been rather more hard-hearted in this.  It is a warning to all of us, that we probably should ignore more emails than we do.  He also made the classic mistake of taking on domestic servants in order to find them a job — as being ‘deserving’ — rather than for their efficiency.  As a result he lived in continual discomfort.  The abolitionist William Wilberforce committed the same error, and with the same results. 

Talking of old age, I had a magazine come through my door from a professional organisation to which I belong.  This had an article on pensions, written by some financial advisor type.  It suggested, risibly, that to give the sort of income he thought adequate, most of us should be paying into our pensions something between 2,000-3,000 GBP a month.  I can’t imagine anyone in a position to do this, in these straitened times, and I certainly am not one of them.  But probably the man who wrote it hoped to gain a percentage commission of these vast sums, and chose his numbers accordingly. 

I’m currently still reading the collected letters of C. S. Lewis — volume 2, not volume 3, as I mistakenly supposed yesterday.  One author whom he quotes with great approval is Novalis.  I remember, many years ago, going into a German bookshop in Munchen-Gladbach and coming out with a copy of Heinrich von Ofterdingen.  But my German is wretched, and I could make nothing of it.  The interesting thing is that I don’t think Lewis’ German was that great either — although he refers to reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales in the original, and finding that there were about five times as many in that language, and many very sinister or sad.  But if so, how did he read Novalis?  Or is there an English translation, unbeknownst to me?

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Eusebius update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This evening I had an email from a French journal, asking for a review copy of the Eusebius, Gospel Problems and Solutions book.  They seem very reputable, and I suspect the enquiry comes thanks to my friends in the Francophone world — thank you all.  I’ve placed the order, and they should get it in a fortnight.

Meanwhile this has spurred me to send 6 copies of the hardback to Les editions du Cerf.  This was part of my deal with them, for permission to use Claudio Zamagni’s Greek text.  Admittedly the copyright position on this is less clear than it was — they may not actually legally own the text (and morally they should not, in my opinion).  But I did agree to this part of the deal, and they have been very helpful and easy to deal with.  So the copies are on their way.  With luck they will encourage more interest still in French circles.

I’m reasonably happy with sales so far, in the first two months, but of course we’re nowhere near break-even point yet.  I do need to market it a bit more as well.

By the way, if you are one of those kindly people who has bought a copy, please feel free to add reviews on Amazon!

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