Category: Announcements

Yesterday I finally located an image online of the page of the Botolph legend from a manuscript in Norway, in Bergen University Library, to be precise.  Today I collated that with Folcard’s “Life of St Botolph” and found that it was word for word identical with the full text, despite being labelled a “breviary” in the catalogue entry.  It only had the end of chapter 5 to the start of chapter 9, but no matter.

But the (unpublished!) catalogue for Bergen, of which an extract was on the webpage, referred to a breviary in Nidaros – modern Trondheim – with a section on Botolph.  This was printed in 1519.  I hunted around, and eventually found a copy online.  It contains the usual breviary stuff, and 6 lections.  I’ve not yet compared it against the Schleswig breviary, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the same text.

A bit more reading revealed that there is a breviary for York, printed in Venice (!) by Johannes Hammam in 1493, which also has readings for Botolph, and a Hereford Breviary that  does.  Apparently the Sarum usage did not, which is something.

The York Breviary does not seem to be online, but an edition of it in two volumes is.  This was produced by the Surtees society, and finding the second volume is not easy!  I located it in Hathi, which had a link to the source in Google Books.  Here they are:

• Breviarium ad usum insignis ecclesie Eboracensis I  1880  (Surtees 71)
• Breviarium ad usum insignis ecclesie Eboracensis 2 1883 (Surtees 75)

Volume 2 does indeed have a “life” of Botolph, on p.182 of the PDF, section 320, in three readings.  Oh well.  In it goes.

I’ve found a three volume edition of the Hereford Breviary, vols 1 and 3 in Archive.org, but no luck finding a “life” in it, although the entry in the list of saints days in vol. 2, p.194 (PDF p.235) says “tres lectiones fiant”.  Hum.  I imagine it’s probably the same set of readings as in the York breviary.

So that’s two – or three – more breviaries when I am trying to finish things up.  Oh well.

In the Iviron monastery on Mt Athos, there is a Georgian manuscript (shelfmark: Athos Iviron 11) which contains a work with the title, “The Word of Saint Barsabas, Archbishop of Jerusalem, about our Savior Jesus Christ and the Churches [and about the High Priests].”  The text itself is a homily, in which various Old Testament figures and events are shown to be “types”, prefigurings, of Christ and the church.  The Georgian text is itself a translation of a lost Greek original.   The work is assigned the reference number CPG 1685.

The text was first published, together with a French translation, by Michel van Esbroeck in the Patrologia Orientalis 41 (1982), pp.151-256.  A draft text and English translation has been made by David P. George, which is accessible on Academia.edu here.

There seems to be only a limited amount of scholarship about this work.  Esbroeck considered that the theology of the work meant that it should be dated early, to the second or third century AD.  He dismissed the identification of the author as an Archbishop of Jerusalem, still less Barsabas Justus, the third bishop of Jerusalem, but agreed that it was probably written at that location.  Quite sensibly van Esbroeck refuses to call the author “pseudo Barsabas”, when we know so little about any Barsabas at all.

There is a useful discussion of the work and its contents by Dmitry F. Bumazhnov, “The Jews in the Neglected Christian Writing “The Word of Saint Barsabas, Archbishop of Jerusalem, about our Saviour Jesus Christ and the Churches” of the Second – Early Third Century”, in: Scrinium 4 (2008), 121–135.  Online here.  A search on Bumazhnov indeed brings up a number of other papers discussing Barsabas.

On his Twitter account recently, Dr. George included a quote suggesting that, at such a date, this could be the earliest mention of the Trinity:

Now this is very interesting, but obvious raises issues.  The word “Trinity” is a fingerprint, and we all know that that word originates with Tertullian, around 217 AD.  I don’t feel competent to enter into the various issues about the supposed date of the work.  But I would be very wary of interpolation or gloss here.  Generally when a word or phrase is the badge of a controversy, we need to date any text using it later than the beginning of that controversy.  When a work clearly written earlier uses it, we may well suppose that a later copyist has added a clarifying note.  I would suspect that this is what has happened here.

I was hunting around the web for an article from an Italian encyclopedia, when I struck lucky.  All twelve volumes had been digitised to PDF, and they were available to download from Archive.org.  Great news!

Well, I only needed volume nine, so I grabbed that.  To my shock, the PDF was over 3 GIGABYTES in size!  That would mean the whole encyclopedia would take a massive 40gb out of my disk space. Yet each volume is only 1200 pages, and I think all of the pages are black and white.

Nor was this the only problem.   A 3Gb PDF is such a large file that Abbyy Finereader wouldn’t open it.  My anti-virus picked it up and complained about it.  My long outdated copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro 9  wouldn’t extract the three pages that I actually needed.  Nor would it print those three pages.  I thought about just buying a copy of whatever the latest version of Acrobat Pro might be; but dear old Adobe, an evil company, has quietly removed the option.  All you can buy is a monthly subscription.

So what on earth to do?  Why was the file so large anyway?

Thankfully I found a free downloadable tool for Windows called PDFSam Basic.  This allowed me to split off the first  few pages, and then I could work with them in Adobe Acrobat 9 as usual.  I extracted the first page to png format, and found that that one page alone was more than 3 megabytes in size.  That’s the same size as a full-colour photograph on my digital camera.  Whoever had made the scans had done so at maximum resolution, in full colour.  For black-and-white text pages.  [Update: do NOT use PDFSam!  It also silently installed it’s paid for model, and the uninstall did not work.]

Well, I used PDFSam to chop the 3Gb monster up into three files, and then I used Adobe Acrobat to “save as” these out to PNG, with settings RGB=off, colourspace=Monochrome.  This produced a directory full of .png files, one for each page, none larger than 150kb, and often much less.  The first page was no longer 3mb but 36kb.  Then I gathered these up into a PDF using Adobe Acrobat and… the PDF file for all the pages was now a  mere 109mb.  Much more sensible.

Only afterwards did it occur to me that this sort of task is what ImageMagick is for.  It’s a very powerful command line tool.  But I don’t currently have that installed because it has so many switches and options that I use it rarely.  And working out what option to use takes a while.

Inspecting the new PDF, I saw that the scanning had been done extremely carelessly.  The opening pages had a large stain across them:

Anybody who has used a photocopier knows that this happens when you haven’t got the page flat on the copier.  Sheer carelessness.

And that’s actually the cause of the huge page sizes too.  Whoever did the scan didn’t bother to set the copier up correctly.  They just scanned at max resolution, full colour, and let the output be whatever size it might be.  Whoever did it was NOT the person who was going to need to use the file.

I think we can all guess how this might happen.  What sort of person has young people at their disposal to do chores like this?

So… my friends, whenever you get a student to scan a book for you, do please remember that they don’t want to do it, and CHECK the results?  Thank you.

Update: Further experiments show that I don’t need to use PDFSam – Acrobat will save as the whole file to .png, even if it won’t do much else.

Today is All Saints’ Day, and I have been looking at the entry for this in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, and attempting to learn some real history about the origins of the medieval festival.

The ODCC has no footnotes, just a short bibliography.  The first of these is Eisenhofer’s Handbuch der katholischen Liturgik, erster band (1932), which I was delighted to discover online at a magnificent German site devoted to Catholic literature, the Deutches Liturgisches Institut.  In the entry, the dedication of an oratory in St Peter’s by Gregory III (731-741) “in honor of the Redeemer, his holy mother, all the apostles, martyrs, and all the perfectly righteous who have fallen asleep throughout the world,” is referenced to Duchesne’s edition of the Liber Pontificalis, vol. 1, 194-204; but also to “Kellner, Heortologie 241”.  The latter is “Heortologie oder das Kirchenjahr und die Heiligenfeste in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung.”

A quick Google search reveals that the Kellner book – by our old friend Heinrich Kellner, who translated all the works of Tertullian into English – exists online, in a 1901 edition; and also, blessedly, in an English translation of 1908, both issued by Herder.

The 1901 edition seems to be the wrong edition, but I can find no later one before 1908.  The material is on page 178.  The English translation is p.323.

But a worm of doubt entered my soul as I looked through the English material.  Because sometimes, in books of this vintage, the English translation omits some of the footnotes.  I encountered just this with Franz Cumont’s book on Mithras, translated into many languages.  And it was utterly infuriating.  Fascinating claims, unreferenced: but if you looked at the original, there was indeed a reference.

So I looked at the German.  And… I cursed heartily.  Yes, the English translation had two footnotes: the German had five!

And…

This is laziness by the translator and publisher and nothing else.

And there is worse.  Note that the English in footnote 1 gives the Patrologia Graeca reference with “l” instead of the correct volume, 50.  Mysteriously the Liber Pontificalis entry is different in footnote 3.

Check these things, boys.  Don’t take it for granted.

In yesterday’s post, there was a reference to a Latin hymn beginning “tantum ergo sacramentum,” whose English translation misled Knox’s schoolboy.  At the time I knew nothing about this.  Thankfully a kind gentleman online knew more.

It seems that this is an excerpt from the medieval 13th century hymn by Thomas Aquinas; and the  translation used is that by Edward Caswall, which was first published in 1849. According to Wikipedia, this translation can be sung to the same tune as the Latin, although this useful feature is achieved at the price of some juggling of lines and words.

An 1854 manual of Catholic devotion happily includes the Latin and this English version in parallel:

Tantum ergo sacramentum
Veneremur cernui:
et antiquum documentum
novo cedat ritui;
Praestet fides supplementum
sensuum defectui.

Genitori genitoque
laus et jubilatio,
Salus, honor, virtus quoque
sit et benedictio!
Procedenti ab utroque
compar sit laudatio!

Down in adoration falling,
Lo! the Sacred Host we hail,
Lo! o’er ancient forms departing
Newer rites of grace prevail;
Faith for all defects supplying,
Where the feeble senses fail.

To the Everlasting Father,
And the Son Who reigns on high
With the Holy Ghost proceeding
Forth from Each eternally,
Be salvation, honour, blessing,
Might, and endless majesty.

The volume in question is “The Golden Manual, or, Guide to Catholic Devotion, Public and Private, Compiled from Approved Sources“, Burns & Lambert (1854).  The excerpt above is on page 665.    It is interesting that the rubric takes the time to discourage the prostration (cernui) that might otherwise inevitably occur.

Caswall’s translation first appeared in “Lyra Catholica: containing all the Breviary and Missal hymns, with others from various sources. Translated by Edward Caswall M.A.”, London: Burns (1818), page 112.  Edward Caswall himself was a friend of John Henry Newman, and the origins of the Lyra Catholica are discussed in his 2005 biography by Nancy Marie De Flon.¹  Caswall made the translation after converting to Catholicism and thereby losing his Anglican living, which left him with time on his hands.  Having independent means, he had no need to seek employment, which means we today benefit from his efforts.

Other translations of the Tantum ergo sacramentum” do exist, of course.  This one seems rather closer to the meaning, although the lines have again been transposed.

Let us worship, humbly bending,
This so glorious sacrament;
And let ancient rites, here ending,
Yield to worth, new rites present;
May faith too, assistance lending
Aid where sense proves impotent.

To the Father, ever heeding
Our petitions, glory be:
To the Son, on Calv’ry bleeding,
Raise the song of jubilee:
And of Him, from both proceeding,
Chaunt the praises equally. Amen.

This example is from “Select Hymns and Prayers. Translated from the original Latin into English lyric verse. By a member of the Society of Jesus. Lat. & Eng“, Dublin (1852), in this case pages 43-44.

English translations of material from the Roman breviary are always handy to have!

1. Nancy Marie De Flon, Edward Caswall: Newman’s Brother and Friend, Gracewing Publishing (2005), p.152.  Google Preview here.[↩]