Category: From my diary

Happy St Botolph’s Day! English Translation of the Epitome in the Schleswig Breviary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

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.

    *    *    *    *

Epitome of the Life of St Botolph, from the Schleswig Breviary[1]

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)

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The Schleswig Breviary (Breviarium Slesvicense)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Duchy of Schleswig is the most northern district of Germany, and since 1920 has been divided between Denmark and Germany.  In 1510 a man with the interesting name of Gottschalk von Ahlefeldt (1475-1541) became bishop of Schleswig.  The Ahlefeldt family were originally of the Danish nobility, but by this time was settled in Germany.  Ahledfeldt seems to have been a clever and competent man, who set about restoring his bankrupt diocese, even mortgaging part of his own income to satisfy the creditors.  Sadly all his efforts were swept away by the rise of Lutheranism in the 1520s, which offered both moral and financial incentives to the local nobility to convert, and he was the last Catholic bishop.  His biography in Danish records that, shortly before his death, he advised the nobility of Holstein not to “lightly let the old doctrine go.”

Soon after his election, in 1512, he commissioned the creation of new service books for his diocese.  Two of these, a Liber Agendarum, and a Breviarium, were printed in Paris that year.  Two copies of the Breviarium Slesvicense are held in the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen (KB København, LN 033 8° copy 1, and copy 2), and catalogued on the Hungarian Usuarium liturgical texts site, here and here.

Here’s the title page of the Breviarium Slesvicense, from KB København, LN 033 8° copy 2:

A single page introduction explains why the work was commissioned.

I.e.

Reuerendus in Christo pater et dominus: dominus Godschalcus de Ahleuelde: dei et apostolice sedis gratia episcopus ecclesiae Sleszuicensis.  Attendens in sua diocesi librorum breviariorum paucitatem: et ex hoc clericis iuxta ordinarium dicte diocesis horas canonicas legere debentibus oriri turbationem et defectum. Quibus pastorali cura inederi cupiens hec breviaria sanctorum ordinarium prefate sue ecclesie et diocesis correcta et impressa auctoritate ordinaria approbauit et confirmauit.  Ac omnibus et singulis Christi fidelibus confessis et contritis ex eisdem libris horas canonicas communiter aut diuisim deo omnipotenti per suam diocesim rite quantum poterint persoluentibus totiens quotiens de omnipotentis dei misericordia: ac beatorum petri et pauli apostolorum eius auctoritate confisus quadraginta dies indulgeniarum de iniunctis ipsis et cuilibet ipsorum penitentiis misericorditer in domino relaxavit. Anno domini Mdillensimo quingenesimo duodecimo.

The Reverend Father and Lord in Christ, Lord Godschalk of Ahlefeldt, by the grace of God and the Apostolic See, Bishop of the Church of Schleswig, observing the scarcity of breviary books in his diocese and the resulting confusion and deficiency among the clergy who are obliged to recite the canonical hours according to the ordinate of the said diocese, desiring to provide for these matters with pastoral care, has approved and confirmed, by his ordinary authority, these corrected and printed breviaries of the saints according to the ordinate of his aforesaid church and diocese. Moreover, trusting in the authority of Almighty God and the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, he has mercifully granted in the Lord, to each and every one of Christ’s faithful who, being confessed and contrite, duly recite the canonical hours either together or separately from these books throughout his diocese as best they can, forty days of indulgence from the penances enjoined upon them and upon each of them, as often as they do so. In the year of our Lord one thousand five hundred and twelve. (DeepSeek)

The volume ends with a lengthy colophon.

This tells us who did the work of compiling it:

Expresis venerabilis virorum dominorum et magistrorum Johannis tetens sacre theologie baccalarii formati lectoris ordinarii: ac Andree Frederici prepositi Wyda i dicta ecclesia canonicorum ibidem necnon providi wesseli goltsme des incole husemen. Cura per vigili domini Seszeconis beszeconis presbyteri medullitus prospectu, ac per venerabilis viros et magistros wilhelmum mercator et Thomas Kees civem in urbe Parisiensi.

Which DeepSeek, slightly cleaned up, renders as:

Produced by the venerable men, the lords and masters, Johannes Tetens, Bachelor of Sacred Theology,[1] and ordinary reader; and Andreas Fredericus, provost of Wida and canon of the said church there, as well as the prudent Wessel Goltsme, resident of Husemen. Carefully overseen with deep insight by the vigilant lord Seszeconis Beszeconis, priest, and by the venerable men and masters, Wilhelm Mercator and Thomas Kees, citizens in the city of Paris.

Guilliemus Marchand and Thomas Kees were the printers.  The work was completed on 16 July 1512.

There is a useful table of contents on the page for copy 1 here, and part of the Breviarium is the “sanctoral offices.”  Each office includes an abbreviated life of the saint.

On folio 347 of copy 1, or 344 of copy 2 (page 704 of the PDFs in both cases) begins the office of St Botolph, and the “Life” is over the page, broken up into 6 readings or lectiones.  This “Life” was copied into the Acta Sanctorum, not very accurately, and is assigned the reference number BHL 1430.

But more about this in the next post.

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  1. [1]baccalaureus formatus is apparently an academic rank: see here.↩

Deciphering a South Arabian script – the Dhofari alphabet

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Out in the deserts of southern Arabia, there are a lot of rocks, and a lot of those rocks have inscriptions painted on them, or inscribed into them.  It seems that not all of these scripts are understood.  I came across an article on Academia by Ahmad al-Jallad, of Ohio State University, on the deciphering of one of them, known as the Dhofari alphabet.

It seems that some rock art found at Duqm, east of Dhofar, in South-Central Oman, in 2022-3 proved to include a text, a snake-like series of letters:

This was misidentified by the original discoverers, but Al-Jallad writes:

…the text is clearly in a variant of the Dhofari alphabet, and its glyph shapes more closely correspond to King’s script 1 classification. The text consists of seven units separated by word dividers. None of the glyphs repeat. I, therefore, submit that we are dealing with an abecedary following the South Arabian halḥam order, and that this text provides our first real key into the glyph-phoneme values for the Dhofari script.

It seems that South Semitic languages have a canonical order of letters, just as we have “a – b – c – d…” etc, and so mapping this inscription to this order gives the meaning of each glyph.  Many of the shapes are clearly related to known forms of the letters.

Dr Al-J. adds:

A primary reason scholars struggled to interpret Dhofari inscriptions as an early form of Modern South Arabian languages was the use of the word bn for ‘son.’ But with the correct understanding of the script, it is clear that the sequence XX should be understood as br and therefore is compatible with the Modern South Arabian Language family.

I don’t suppose that most of us know anything about Arabian language inscriptions, but the discovery is interesting for how the author went about it.

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Interesting work on searching Migne for themes at scholarios.graeca.org

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve had an email from Evangelos Varthis, telling me about his project at Ionian University.  It’s still very experimental, but there is some very interesting thinking going on here.  Basically he’s making the Greek text of the PG available, in image, and in electronic text, plus a simple way to get an AI translation of it alongside.

Here’s what he says:

I am mainly involved in presenting information about PG Migne and I personally appreciate and understand the value of these texts….

Experimentally, I and others have uploaded a list of patristic texts from various sources, mainly to see how Artificial Intelligence translation can help.

The Greek texts have a decent translation into Greek (I understand Greek and English), although manual editing is required in various places for greater clarity. Here I would say that even human translated material has a degree of ambiguity.

If you have time, visit the following website, i would appreciate any feedback.
https://scholarios.graeca.org/pgworks/

also (select greek text and right click to translate)
https://scholarios.graeca.org/public/pgfront/index.html?vol=1&page=0001

The first link takes you to a list of authors and works.

Clicking on the first of these gives a list of languages, and clicking English gives you this:

However I notice that the AI translation has omitted the title and first sentence, so perhaps a bug there.  All the same, this works fine.

The second link takes you to a presentation of the volumes with parallel transcription, and again an AI translation option.  This is potentially really useful.  Unfortunately there is some work to do here: the only way to change page is to change the URL manually – not a problem – and right-clicking on the text brings up a menu, which, instead of calling the AI translation, prompts for the text to translate!  I’m sure that this did work, but AI can be tricky like that, and changes what response it gives without warning.

All the same, this will be a very useful thing to have when they’ve got a bit further down the line with it.  Well done guys!

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The First Hymn: Resurrected third-century praise song (P.Oxy 1786)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via Twitter I learn of a bit of a buzz about a papyrus.  That’s always a good thing in principle – public interest means funding!  Indeed the whole Oxyrhynchus papyri project came about because the public got interested in “new words of Jesus” and a newspaper raised the money to find more.  So what’s this one about?

Via Baptist Press here:

What was left of the hymn, archeologists found 100 years ago in ancient Egyptian ruins on a scrap of tattered papyrus, long buried by desert sand. The discovery was sealed in a climate-controlled vault at Oxford University until John Dickson came along.

Dickson, who joined Wheaton College in 2022 as the inaugural Jean Kvamme Distinguished Professor of Biblical Studies and Public Christianity, began to realize the importance of the papyrus for today’s Christians.

“I’m thinking, why has no one brought this back to life? You know, this is a song from before there were denominations,” he told Baptist Press. “And it’s thoroughly Orthodox Christian theology.”

Archeological dating could certify without a doubt, Dickson said, that the hymn dated to the mid-200s, owing to paleography and “a corn contract on the back” of the papyrus. About a fifth of the words, the beginning lines, were missing, he said, as well as the corresponding tune to the missing lyrics. But the rest, including a tune that would have resonated with pagans of the day, was intact.

What is most notable, Dickson said, is the certainty with which the song presents the Trinity, although it predates by generations the Council of Nicaea, in 325 AD, which scholars say confirmed the Trinity.

But Dickson’s challenge was rebirthing the hymn in tune and lyrics for today’s Christians, while maintaining the high praise of the early Christians…. Chris Tomlin, whom Time Magazine has hailed as “potentially the most often sung artist in the world,” and Ben Fielding of Australia….

The massive collaboration comes together in a song, The First Hymn Project, releasing April 11 worldwide, and the accompanying documentary featuring a cast of scholars streaming April 14 in the U.S. on Wonder. Special documentary showings and concerts are scheduled 7-9 p.m. April 14 at Biola University in La Mirada, Calif., and April 15 from 7-9 p.m. at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.

And another site here.  The razzmatazz is a little alien to the world of scholarship, but if it brings interest and money to papyrology then only a fool could disapprove.  (Although past experience suggests that papyrology actually does contain a significant number of elitist fools….)

The articles tend to give the impression that this is a fresh discovery. But it is not.

It is in fact P.Oxy 1786, published in 1922 in volume 15 of the Oxyrhynchyus papyri.  It is held in the Sackler Library in Oxford.  There are pictures online at the Oxyrhynchus site here.  There is even a Wikipedia article about it.

Well done, John Dickson.

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Kassel University online manuscripts -a fabulous interface!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Well here’s something special! (via this twitter post)  The image below (online here) is fairly familiar.  It shows the “serpent column” in Constantinople, as it was in the 16th century before the heads broke off.  The column is still there, in the Hippodrome.  It is, in fact, the ancient Greek monument commemorating the battle of Marathon, where the Greek cities defeated the Persians.  On it are inscribed the names of all the cities that sent soldiers.  But this is not what makes this site special.

Kassel 4° Ms. hist. 31 (Türkisches Manierenbuch / A Book of Turkish Customs), image 33 / f15r

The whole manuscript is there! It’s on folio 15r, which is the 33rd image in the manuscript.  The manuscript itself is a 16th century collection of illustrations of Turks in costume, with a few other things like this.  Such collections of pictures exist at other libraries too.

The interface is actually useful, at least on PC.  You get thumbnails, you get IIIF, you get proper references.  It’s really rather marvellous.  Universität Kassel have excelled!  The platform is something called “Orka”, and frankly this is very nice.

The breadcrumbs at the top make it easy to find the collection, select the Latin manuscripts, display a list of shelfmarks.  Whoever designed this actually talked to people who use these sites.

There are some 474 Latin manuscripts dated before 1500, which is very respectable.  And, blessedly, you can display 100 mss at a time, in various orders.

It’s tremendously useful.  It’s now time to note that the Kassel manuscripts are online, and may be accessible and usable.

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T. C. Schmidt, “Josephus & Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

T. C. Schmidt has bravely added to the bibliography on the so-called Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus, with a new book through Oxford University Press, titled: “Josephus & Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ.”  The author makes the case that this much-discussed passage is “substantially authentic.”  In doing so he responds to recent scholarship on the subject, some of which has been unduly sceptical.

But thankfully the PDF is open-access!  It can be downloaded from OUP here, or at the promotional website at https://josephusandjesus.com/.  The printed book can be found on Amazon.com here, and Amazon.co.uk here, in a few days.

Here’s the abstract:

This book brings to light an extraordinary connection between Jesus of Nazareth and the Jewish historian Josephus. Writing in 93/4 CE, Josephus composed an account of Jesus known as the Testimonium Flavianum. Despite this being the oldest description of Jesus written by a non-Christian, scholars have long doubted its authenticity due to the alleged pro-Christian claims it contains. The present book, however, authenticates Josephus’ authorship and then reveals a startling discovery. First, the opening chapters demonstrate that ancient Christians read the Testimonium Flavianum quite differently from modern scholars, considering it to be basically mundane or even vaguely negative, and hence far from the pro-Christian rendering that most scholars have interpreted it to be. This suggests that the Testimonium Flavianum was indeed written by a non-Christian. The book then employs stylometric analysis to demonstrate that the Testimonium Flavianum closely matches Josephus’ style. The Testimonium Flavianum appears, therefore, to be genuinely authored by Josephus. The final chapters explore Josephus’ sources of information about Jesus, revealing a remarkable discovery: Josephus was directly familiar with those who attended the trials of Jesus’ apostles and even those who attended the trial of Jesus himself. The book concludes by describing what Josephus tells us about the Jesus of history, particularly regarding how the stories of Jesus’ miracles and his resurrection developed.

Dr S. has also published a series of tweets with excerpts on his Twitter account, starting here.  Unfortunately I lack the time to review the book properly at the moment.

For some time now, the consensus of scholarship has been that the passage is authentic but corrupt.  A few scholars have seen the passage as entirely corrupt, and a few as entirely authentic.  Every word, almost every word-division, has been examined and thrashed over at incredible length for centuries now.

If I might venture a little bit of speculation, the real reason why there has been no lasting consensus is that the text “feels wrong” to everyone, but that nobody can agree on just why it is wrong, or which pieces of it are wrong.  This has led to three different positions, held with varying degrees of certainty.

Some unable to find any solid ground upon which to stand, in desperation dismiss the whole passage as an interpolation.  Unfortunately this conclusion raises as many questions as it solves.  Others, unable to find any solid ground on which to object to any particular passage, have accepted the whole passage as genuine.  This seems to be a mirror image of the rejectionist position.  Most writers have hedged their bets!

Versions of the text appear in several languages.  One area which is extremely welcome is that Dr. S. has published photographs of the manuscripts, and shown that the text varies more than we tend to think.  We all know that Jerome wrote “credebatur esse Christum,” “he was believed to be the Christ,” in his own book.  But it is fascinating to find that “he was the Christ” appears in the second oldest Latin manuscript.

Much of the writing on the passage tends to rely on the “Fernseed and Elephants” type of criticism, in which monsters start to appear in the vision of any critic if he stares through the magnifying glass, straining, at one piece of text long enough.

One particularly extreme version of the rejectionist position is the claim that, not only is the TF an interpolation, but it is a forgery, and a forgery by poor old Eusebius of Caesarea, who quotes it three times in different works.  This claim first appeared decades ago in an article by Solomon Zeitlin, and there have been a couple of attempts to revive it.  The efforts made to justify this allegation have led to some very strained claims.  Kindly Dr S. has referenced a couple of articles of my own on some of this stuff.   Rightly Dr Schmidt has felt it necessary to review the claim in an appendix, and to look at the citation practices of Eusebius.  The latter would be a useful book all on its own, and it would be no small undertaking either.

In summary, Dr S. has done us all a service by placing the whole debate in a single volume, and pointing out the weaknesses in arguments that we have all

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Dead writers and fake “Britannica” websites

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Mithras is a perennial favourite for online nonsense.  It seems that “AI” is parroting a strange article, attributed to Reinhold Merkelbach, and appearing on the fake “Britannica” website. 

Britannica went out of business sometime in the 1990s, destroyed by the rise of the personal computer.  Nobody knows who owns it now, or who actually writes the articles.  I have often found them full of crude errors.

Reinhold Merkelbach was indeed a substantial scholar, but he has been dead since 2006. So he most certainly did not edit that 2025 article.

In fairness, it might be that the article draws upon some older article in which that scholar of an early generation expressed ideas that were already obsolete.  But this I cannot tell.

The statements made in that article seem to reflect the pre-1971 idea that Roman Mithras – not recorded before AD 80 – “must” be the same as the ancient Persian cult of Mithra or Mitra.

But the 1971 conference on Mithraic studies demolished this idea very thoroughly.  The archaeology of Mithras is very distinctive, especially the underground temples.  But not one of them is known from outside the Roman empire.  And all the earliest archaeology comes from Rome.  If you look at Vermaseren’s two mighty volumes, the Corpus Inscriptionum Monumentumque Religionis Mithriacae, you see a man who still places the eastern material first.  But that eastern material betrays the problem: it is a shabby, thin collection.  The section on Rome dwarfs it.

It was therefore impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Roman cult was a fake.  It was like the Greek “Zoroaster” literature – something which appears to be oriental, but is in fact home-grown, and merely dressed up in foreign garb.  This sort of barbarian appeal is something known in our own times, from the popularity of the fakir in Edwardian drawing-rooms, and the guru in the hippy movement of the 1960s.

The “AI” practice of producing a digest of random nonsense, treated as authoritative by the young, is a real curse.  For the unwary look no further.  All sorts of ideas that many of us laboured to combat are now reappearing.

I have found that my own website of Mithras material is now slipping down the algorithm.  Today I have moved it to a subdomain, so it can be now found at https://mithras.tertullian.org.  Old links will redirect.  Why?  Because dear old Google won’t recognise any site as a “site” unless it is on its own domain or subdomain.

I have also today discovered that Twitter has allowed it’s “twitter card” product to decay.  Tweets including material from my site just bring up boxes with no images.  I’ve tried to fix that today, but it may take a little while.

Of course large corporations have the resources to fix these things.  It is the ordinary chap who is left behind.  Yay for the internet of corporations.

I’ve been away for a few days, but I return to a full inbox – that curse of the holiday-maker!  My apologies if I have not got to your email yet.

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From my diary: British Library manuscripts of the Life of St Botulf.

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A couple of days ago I wrote to the British Library manuscripts department to enquire about the two manuscripts that contain versions of the medieval Latin “Life” of St Botulf.  Yesterday I received a really quite helpful reply.

Cotton MS Tiberius D III is a Special Access (Select) manuscript, so I’m afraid it’s not permitted to take photographs of that. However, there is a surrogate microfilm, Microfilm 2492, which you could take photos of for personal reference use.

Cotton MS Tiberius E I has been divided into two volumes, and it looks like the “Life” of St Botulf [Botulph] is now in Volume 2, at ff.14v-15v:

Cotton MS Tiberius E I/2    John Tynemouth, Sanctilogium Angliae, Walliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae
ff. 1r: Sts Petroc (Bibliotheca Hagiogrphica Latina 6640), continued from the previous volume; ff. 1r–3v: Boniface (BHL 1406); ff. 3v–4v: Gudwal (BHL 3690); ff. 4v–6v: Robert of Newminster (BHL 7269); ff. 6v–7v: William of York (BHL 8910); ff. 7v–10r: Columba (BHL 1891); ff. 10r–11v: Ivo (BHL 4624); ff. 11v–13v: Margaret of Scotland, with marginal genealogies (BHL 5326); ff. 13v–14v: Odulphus (BHL 6321); ff. 14v–15v: Botulph (BHL 1429); ff. 15v–19r: Alban; … …
Decoration: Each life opens with an initial, either red with blue pen-work or blue with red pen-work. Small initials in blue and red throughout.    A parchment codex.    2nd half of the 14th century    Latin

There are no access restrictions for this, so you can take photos from the original manuscript.

The “select” manuscripts at the British Library are those which require special permission to access.  In this case, I suspect that damage from the fire is the reason.  I’ve written to check.

The first manuscript is a copy of the full text, which is the one that I need, unfortunately.  The other is an abbreviated “Life”, which I will work on later.  But I may as well get what I need now.

Looking at the British Library website, this says that imaging services, i.e. “photography” are unavailable.  This is the legacy of the cyber-attack in October 2023.  The attack must have been very impressive indeed, if it not only destroyed all the IT, and took all the manuscripts offline forever, but also ensured that the library staff were unable to use cameras even a year and a half later, or even hire a reprographics bureau.   Very strong stuff.

But on the positive side it does mean that I can get some perfectly usable photographs with my smartphone with no fuss.  Let us hope the microfilm is readable.

So it seems that I shall have to make a visit to London town.  The journey from here is long and expensive – it’s probably easier and cheaper to get a budget flight from Milan than to travel in by train – but what must be will be.  I’ve not been down for many years.  I prefer the countryside!

It’s now more than forty years since I went down to London one Sunday afternoon, in order to start my working career on the Monday.  I booked into a cheap hotel in Bloomsbury, where the doorman looked down his nose at this nervous lad with his rucksack.  It rained that evening, and I walked down to Denmark Street, and I looked into the window of Forbidden Planet, the Sci-Fi bookshop that used to be there.  London on a Sunday night can be very dark.  But there was a recession on, and I knew that I was lucky to have got a job at all.  It’s funny how some memories remain with you.

Anyway, I shall have to discover how the trains work these days, and the underground.  It will probably be in a couple of weeks.  Meanwhile there is plenty of material to work with.

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From my diary: Gray’s Inn MS 3

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Gray’s Inn is located in central London near the law courts.  It is one of the four “inns of court” to which all barristers and judges must belong.  The inns of court are medieval, but I know nothing much about them.

Gray’s Inn Library contains a collection of 24 medieval manuscripts.  Horwood, the author of the catalogue from 1869, does not know where they came from, and I have been unable to locate any recent scholarship on the manuscripts. But the suggestion is that they were donated by members over the centuries.  Some of these did come from monastic institutions.

Gray’s Inn MS 3 is a collection of saints’s lives.  From the Legendiers Latins website, I learned that it contains a copy of Folcard’s “Life” of St Botulf (BHL 1428), on folios 136r-137r.  This is a copy of the full text, but without either the rather nervous dedicatory letter to Wakelin, bishop of Winchester, nor the “translatio” of Botulf’s relics from Iken to wherever.  The Horwood catalogue from 1869 gives only a very brief entry, which tells us nothing about the origins of the manuscript.  It suggests that the manuscript is 11th century, which seems a bit early to me.

Yesterday I sent an email of enquiry.  Later the same day, I was astonished and delighted to receive a reply, containing a PDF with colour photographs of the relevant pages.  Very efficient indeed!  I am very grateful to the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn.

Here’s a bit of folio 136r.  It shows the “explicit” from the previous text – the passiones of SS. Cyriacus and Jullita – and  then in red the “incipit vita sancti botulfi abbatis quae celebratur xv kalend. Julii.” – “the start of the life of St. Botulf the abbot, which is celebrated on 15th day before the kalends of July.”  That’s the 17th June in our calendar.

The images are perfectly clear and readable.  I have started to process the manuscript into my collation of all the manuscripts, which is in a Word document.  You can see in the image above that, as I am the proud owner of a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro – albeit in the elderly version 9 – I have added “sticky notes” to the PDFs, in order to indicate where the start of each chapter is.  This habit assists you markedly in finding passages in the text when you are trying to compare manuscripts.  You learn by doing.

My initial impression is that the variants in this copy feel a bit unsound.  These are later tweaks to the text.  But we will see.

One very interesting feature appears in the names of kings.  The scribe has written them, not as “Adelmundus”, which is what every other manuscript has, but as “Aethelmundus”, complete with ligature “æ” and “thorn” – æþelmundus:

I have never seen this in a Latin manuscript.  Is this an antiquarian at work, perhaps?  I really ought to dig out some paleography materials and try to work out the date of the bookhand.  Maybe later.

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