Two more fragments of Eusebius’ work on the gospels have come into today, which is great news! These two are translated from the Coptic.
Author: Roger Pearse
British Library don’t know what “manuscript” means?
From the BL, a request for clarification of my FoI query, “how many images of manuscripts did you license for online use last year?” How did I define ‘manuscript’, they asked? I responded as courteously as possible by referring them to their own catalogue of manuscripts. I suspect that I am dealing with a department that doesn’t get asked much about these! Still, they’re turning it around promptly which is good, and better than I expected.
Russian site with loads of original language Greek patristic texts
I’ve just discovered this link:
It includes masses of Greek, including Adamantius; plus the Syriac New Testament, and much else. Thanks to Evangelical Textual Criticism for this one.
Adamantius, De recta in deum fide
One stray ante-Nicene work that never appeared in the Ante-Nicene Fathers collection is a dialogue On the true faith in God attributed in the manuscripts to an otherwise unknown Adamantius. Of course Origen was known as Adamantius also, but the author of this work holds anti-Origenist views.
The work consists of a dialogue in two parts, held with the pagan Eutropius as arbiter, on which is the real Christianity. In the first part, the author disputes with two Marcionites. In the second a follower of Bardesanes is refuted.
The text makes use of now lost works by Methodius, and therefore cannot be much earlier than 300 AD. It is extant in the original Greek in at least ten manuscripts, and also in a translation by Rufinus. It was published in the Patrologia Graeca 11, and a critical text exists in the GCS vol. 4 (1901) which is online, albeit only to Americans and contains both the Greek and Rufinus’ Latin. An English translation by Robert A. Pretty was published in 1997 by Peeters, but sadly is offline.
I have been sent a quotation from the work, or rather what is apparently a paraphrase of a passage from it, which is as follows:
“What right has he [a heretic] to assert that the Messiah wrote the gospel? The gospel writer did not refer to himself as the Christ but to Jesus who he is proclaiming.”
I have no idea where in the dialogue this can be found. Does anyone have any ideas?
Placing stuff online – how much the British Library make from charging people for this
My Freedom of Information request to the British Library got a reply a couple of days ago. I asked:
I note that the BL charges a fee to websites that use digital images of pages from manuscripts from the BL collection.
Please would you let me know, for each of the past 5 years (either calendar or financial, whichever is more convenient):
How many requests were made for use of BL collection images of these items on third party websites.
How much income was received by the BL in consideration of the use of BL collection images of these items on third party websites.
Looking into the finances of one of our public research libraries can only be interesting and illuminating! I got back an interesting reply that didn’t quite answer the question, as regards manuscripts, and instead gave figures for all items in the collection. I think someone read my question a bit too quickly, perhaps!! So I’ve asked them to review it.
They sent the reply in a non-searchable PDF, unfortunately. (Curiously they stick a copyright notice on the information – habit, I suppose). Here’s the reply.
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 – REQUEST 0929
We have considered your request and provide answers to your questions in turn below.
‘How much income was received by the BL in consideration of the use of BL collection images on third party websites.’
The revenue generated by charging for rights to reproduce images of items in the British Library collections for the previous five financial years (April to March) was as follows:
£ 2004/5 2005/6 2006/7 2007/8 2008/9 Total revenue 296,889 273,528 274,496 278,287 352,748 The number of requests for rights to reproduce images for which a charge was made was as follows:
2004/5 2005/6 2006/7 2007/8 2008/9 Requests 1952 2090 2270 2770 1728 In certain cases, we waive the charge for rights for reproduction of images. Our records do no enable us to produce precise figures for this period but the approximate number of these is in the region of 800 per year.
This is very helpful, and quite interesting, all by itself. Only a handful of requests each year, to one of the world’s richest libraries? That feels wrong. But who is doing the paying? The sum is not really that high, for a major government institution, and probably can be broken down further. We need more info, that’s for sure.
I will keep you updated!
Medieval library catalogues
One of the most interesting books to delve into, if you have a little Latin, is Gustav Becker’s Catalogi bibliothecarum antiqui. This was published in 1885 and consists of reprints of all the catalogues of medieval abbeys. Books were treasures in medieval abbeys, which could be pawned for cash, and inventories were therefore taken of what books the abbey owned.
You can see three such catalogues, all for the very well-endowed abbey of Corbie in Northern France here. Here is the first one, the shortest, from the 11th century, with Becker’s note of where he was reprinting it from:
§55. Corbeia = Corbie. saec. XI.
HI CODICES [LIBRI Delisle] REPERTI SUNT IN ARMARIO
SANCTI PETRI.1-3. Expositio Cassiodori super psalterium in tribus libris. — 4. Hieronymus in Isaiam prophetam. — 5. item Hieronymus super Ezechielem libri V. — 6. Herenei [Irenaei Mai] episcopi Ludunensis [Lugdun. Mai.] contra omnes hereses. — 7. Augustinus de natura et origine animae ad Renatum. — 8. epithalamium Origenis in cantica canticorum. — 9. lex Romana ab Alarico rege abbreviata. — 10. libri veterum sedecim. — 11. Libri Novellarum sex Theodosii I, Valentiniani I, Martiani I. — 12. lex Burgundionum. — 13. lex Gothorum. — 14. Iulius Frontinus de geometria. in eodem Siculus Flaccus de agris. — 15. Chigenus [Hyginus. Mai.] Augustus de limitibus statuendis. — 16. Euclides de figuris geometricis. — 17. item Augustinus de solutionibus diversarum quaestionum. — 18. concordiae evangelistarum libri IIII sancti Augustini.
19. ecclesiastica historia Eusebii. — 20. excerptiones Eugypii. — 21. retractatio in libris confessionum Augustini. — 22. tractatus sancti Ambrosii de officiis. — 23. expositio Hesychii presbyteri super leviticum. — 24. Rufinus in librum numeri. — 25. historia Hegesippi. — 26. codex pragmaticus Tiberii Augustii. — 27. tripertita historia. — 28. Augustinus de opere monachorum. — 29. liber sancti Ambrosii de trinitate ad Gratianum imperatorem. — 30. homiliae Origenis de Balaam et Balac et in eodem Iohannis de reparatione lapsi. — 31. Tertullianus de resurrectione carnis, de trinitate, de spectaculis, de munere, de prescriptionibus ereticorum, de ieiuniis adversus fisicos, de monogamia, de pudicitia. — 32. Augustinus de utilitate credendi. — 33. Salvianus episcopus de gubernatione Dei.
34-43. libri sancti Clementis numero decem. — 44. Hieronymi libri tres in Zachariam prophetam. — 45. item Hieronymus in Hieremiam prophetam. — 46. collationes abbatis Piamon de tribus generibus monachorum. — 47. Ambrosius episcopus de fide ad Gratianum imperatorem. — 48. Augustinus de trinitate. — 49. homeliae Origenis in genesim. — 50. Hieronymus de nominibus urbium vel locorum. — 51. Ratbertus Paschasius de corpore et sanguine Domini. — 52. Fulgentius episcopus de remissione peccatorum. — 53. altercatio Atici [Attici Mai.] orthodoxi et Cretoboli [Critobuli Mai.] heretici. — 54. Hieronymus in Danihelem prophetam. — 55. Optati Milibitani [milivetani Mai.] episcopi libri septem ad Parmenianum scismaticam. — 56. Eusebius de fide adversus Sabellium. — 57. Augustinus de singularitate clericorum. — 58. libri duo Hieronymi contra Rufinum presbyterum. — 59. item Hieronymus contra lovinianum. — 60. Firmiani Lactantii liber de falsa religione.
(Mai Spicilegium Roman. V, 202-3. ex Ms. 520 reginae Christinae, parvam partem dedit Delisle Mém. de l’institut de France. Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. t. 24, 339. vel in Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes Ser.V. tom.Ip.512. cf. Montfaucon bibl. Mss. II, 1406.)
Many of these books and names will mean little to most of us. Irenaeus Against Heresies is there; a rare Tertullian also. Eusebius’ Church History is there, plus Eusebius “Adversus Sabellium” must mean his five books Against Marcellus, in a Latin version; I had not known until this moment that such existed. Augustine and Ambrose and Jerome are all well represented. Origen’s Homilies on Genesis are present. And so is Euclid, amazingly enough!
Paging through Becker is to gain an idea of what books were really circulating in the west in the Middle ages, at least before 1300 when he ends.
But what about the Greek East? What sort of inventories exist for Greek monastic collections? I would very much like to know; because I don’t know of any equivalent book for these.
Book lists do exist. A 16th century list — probably part of a bookseller’s bait-and-switch scam — is here. But what about the abbey inventories?
Cicero and Caesar in Macrobius
Servilia was Caesar’s mistress, but he was also thought to be seeing her daughter Tertia (lit. “third”). At the sales of property confiscated during the proscriptions, Servilia bought a lot of property very cheaply. Cicero said, “You’ll understand better the good price that Servilia got, if you know that Caesar was knocking off a third”. — Macrobius, Saturnalia, book 2.
From my diary
I have now finished reading James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers and written the first draft review. I think that I will let it simmer for a while. I remember writing a review of Stephen Carlson’s book on “Secret Mark” and inadvertantly expressing myself in a way that sounded much more negative than I intended. Let’s avoid that this time!
The book itself is actually a very good book. Judging from the amount of nonsense I see online about “science and religion”, it’s almost certainly a very necessary book. It’s aimed at the general reader with an interest in the history of science (which I can’t say I really have). I suspect the book ought to be shorter, tho.
Cyril of Alexandria – commentaries on Paul’s letters
Ben Blackwell is thinking about translating the commentaries of Cyril of Alexander on Romans and the other letters, as part of a post-doctoral project. Doing so could only benefit everyone. He discusses how he is going about it, and (excitingly) how the online TLG now has parsing information (if you can access it!) Computer-based resources must be increasingly important in translation, I think.
One wry thought: the “standard” edition is that of Philip Pusey; who died in 1880! So neglected is Cyril in the West. A new critical text would seem a desideratum; or at least, a few papers on the manuscript tradition. It is unlikely that Pusey had access to the best mss.
Still, the first step in making a new edition would be to become conversant with the text and its problems, and the best way to do that is to make a translation of it into some other language. So Ben might be beginning a life’s work here! Either way, for a scholar setting out, it would seem that he is looking at unexplored territory. Go for it, Ben!
The dissolution of Evesham abbey
“The sufferings of history, for example, are dulled by repetition and time, but personal accounts bring such events to life. The Dissolution of the Monasteries has become to many yet another ‘statistic’ to be absorbed in a study of a larger-than-life Henry VIII, yet it was an agonising period for the men who devoted their lives to the Church.
“In the first of the STC (short title catalogue) sales in 1973, for example, one item was a 1537 first edition of Matthew’s version of the Bible which belonged to John Alcetur (Alcester), a monk at the great Benedictine Abbey of Evesham. The Abbey, partly owing to its size and partly to the resistance of Abbot Lichfield, was one of the last to be suppressed. Only about twenty Benedictine abbeys and priories survived into the year 1540, and by the end of that year not one remained. Alcester had made extensive annotations in Latin and English, and had covered three blank pages with a musical score, probably of his own composition.
“However, it is his personal record, at the end of the Book of Maccabees, of Henry’s tough measures that makes poignant reading today. He wrote:
. . . the monastery of Evesham was suppressed by Kyng Henry the viii the xxxi yere of his raygne the xxx day of Januer at Evensong tyme the convent beyng in the quere [choir] at thys verse [in the Magnificat] Deposuit potentes and wold not suffur them to make an ende. Phillypp Ballard beyng Abbot at that tyme and xxxv Relygius men at that day alyre in the seyde monastry . . .
“It is thought that within two months of the suppression of the Abbey, Alcester’s Bible was taken from him.” — Roy Hartley Lewis, Antiquarian books: an insider’s account, pp.138-9.