Category: Announcements

General announcements

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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From my diary: Cotton manuscripts at the British Library

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Bollandist fathers in Belgium have maintained a wonderful database of the medieval manuscripts containing copies of material about the saints, especially their “Lives” and this has been fed into the new Legendiers Latins website.  But the information is not comprehensive.  For instance, for St Botulf, it does not contain any mention of British Library manuscript Cotton Tiberius D. iii.

I don’t know much about the Cotton manuscripts.  As so often with major manuscript libraries, the “Cotton” collection is so called because it was assembled by an individual, whose manuscripts came into the British Library in a bunch.  In this case the donor was Sir Robert Cotton, or rather his grandson, and the circumstances may be read at Wikipedia here.

Cotton divided his manuscripts into groups, which he named after Roman emperors.  Apparently each group was in a particular book case, with the bust of the emperor on the top.  So the shelfmark tells us that this manusccript could be found in the “Tiberius” bookcase shelf D, number 3.

Unfortunately the Cotton manuscripts were all damaged in a fire in the 18th century.  Some were preserved intact; others burned to a crisp; and everything in between.  Scholars still needed to be able to consult the remains, so ingenious solutions were found such as this:

Cotton MS Tiberius E VI

The British Library has a webpage which has links to digitised copies of the manuscript catalogues.  There are two catalogues for the Cotton manuscripts, one from 1696, one from 1802.  Oddly the newer catalogue is less comprehensive.  Here is the entry for our MS:

The Smith catalogue entry is:

Entry 53 is our text, and tells us that  it contains the letter “ad Walchelmum episcopum”, i.e. the dedicatory letter to Wakelin, bishop of Winchester.  There’s no folio numbers, but Hardy’s “Descriptive catalogue of materials” tells us that it’s folios 223v-225v, and 13th century.

The truth is that looking at the Smith catalogue is an overwhelming experience for anyone interested in the history of our people.  This is a vast collection of material, all of it of the highest importance for English history.  Cotton even owned a Magna Carta!  He collected all this stuff from the ruined monasteries.  It’s one thing to read words about how important the collection was for historical purposes.  It’s quite another to read through the list of saints – all English or British – and realise that this is the raw stuff of medieval England.

This leads us to the next question – what survives of BL Cotton Tiberius D. iii?

I don’t know the answer.  I do know that back in 1901 when Horstmann issued a new edition of the Nova Legenda Anglie of Capgrave, originally printed in the 15th century by Wynkyn de Worde, he collated the “Life” of St Botulf with the Cotton manuscript.  There are variants in the footnotes!  So it must be readable to at least some extent?

I do have a readers’ card for the British Library manuscripts department.  Sadly it is no longer valid since the cyber-attack a few years ago.  The BL website informs me that I would have to get a new letter of introduction from an academic in order to get another.  Curiously I must get a fresh one every time I renewed the readers’ card (!).  Getting a new letter of introduction is awkward for an independent researcher like myself.  Indeed I don’t quite know whom I would ask.  I don’t really want the journey anyway.

I will pop an email over and see if there is another way!

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From my diary: Cambridge, St Johns College Library MS H.6

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I started with a list of manuscripts of the “Life of St Botulf” by Folcard.  Some I had already in PDF form, others I could find online.  For others in English libraries, I have ventured to write to the institution and ask for help.  This has been very generously forthcoming.

One of the manuscripts is at Cambridge, St John’s College, MS 209, or H.6, as I  gather it is now known.  The college has a very nice catalogue for it online here.  I wrote a few days ago asking for help.  Yesterday, so very quickly, I received a very kind reply from Adam Crothers, the PhD helping out with the special collections.  He enclosed a PDF of the relevant pages!  The images are in a very clear high-resolution greyscale scan!

By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge.

This scan was plainly professionally photographed.  It is ideal to work with.  It calls to you to do so, to start editing, transcribing, collating!  The beautifully clear writing is almost an education in paleography itself, as you work through the text and note the abbreviations.  Note the “eius” = “ei9”, four lines from the bottom.  Underneath it, “ad gloriam”, abbreviated.  Or “cecum” (blind), at the start of the last but one.

The manuscript is 12th century, written only a few decades after the composition of the text.  It was donated to the college in modern times, but the catalogue tells me that at the top of folio 1 are the (erased) words:

liber ecclesie diui Benedicti de Ramsey

book of the church of St Benedict of Ramsey

So this book came from Ramsey Abbey, only a dozen miles from Thorney Abbey, where Folcard composed the text.

This manuscript does not just include the text of the “Life”.  It also includes a copy of the dedicatory letter (“prologus”) by the author to Wakelin, the Norman bishop of Winchester after the conquest.  This is not common in the manuscripts of the “Life.”

The presence of this letter is very welcome: it was undoubtedly part of the author’s manuscript, and so this suggests that the text has been less tampered with than in most manuscripts.  I have already collated it, and I think that there were only two unique variants, both obviously scribal mistakes.  In general it gives exactly the text which I suspect Folcard wrote.

MS H.6 then follows the “Life” with another Botulf item: a “translatio”, an account of the transfer of the bones of St. Botulf from Iken to … well, wherever they ended up.  It begins with “Coenobium Thornense…”, another reference to Thorney Abbey.  This “translatio” includes a reference to the “Life”, and the author uses very very similar vocabulary.  I’ve spent a bit of time today transcribing this into a Word document, but I’ve only done about 20% of it.

I am very grateful to Adam and St John’s College for the chance to work with this very fine manuscript.

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Hey! Teacher! Leave them texts alone! Some critical thoughts on the text of the Life of St Botulf

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The “Life” of St Botulf by Folcard of St Bertin was first printed in 1668 by the librarian of the Maurist fathers, Luc D’Achery, whose sole source was a manuscript from “Utica” – i.e. St Evroul in Normandy, plus his imagination.  It was then printed again in 1701 as part of the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum.  As sources, the unknown editor of the AASS text had only D’Achery’s edition, and his own imagination; but also two further manuscripts – notable because the first few chapters were missing – one from Rooklooster, the other from Cologne.  The text has not been edited since.

For the last week or so, I have been comparing manually those manuscripts in my possession with the texts printed by D’Achery and the Bollandists.  As part of this, I am compiling a collation in a word document.  Going through this repeatedly is beginning to reveal the truth about the editions, and indeed about the text.

For the last couple of days, I have been collating the Lincoln Cathedral manuscript.  This, unlike the others, is also lacking the first few chapters.

The shortened Lincoln manuscript has a great number of minor changes, when compared to the near unanimity of three other manuscripts of the full text.  This leads inexorably to a conclusion: the text in the Lincoln manuscript is not just shortened at the front.  It is actually a separate recension, a separate version of the text, with its own particular readings.

One fingerprint is that the creator of the shortened text had a habit of reversing words in the text, for no obvious reason.  So the full text reads “pascua ducendo”, but our boy writes “ducendo pascua”.

The same trait appears in the Bollandist’s edition, when compared with D’Achery.  I have yet to check the Rooklooster manuscript, but I suspect that it will show the same trait.

All these little changes mess up the otherwise impressive unanimity of the witnesses of the full text.  I have decided to show them in light blue, because they really have nothing to do with the text.  These are changes, not errors.

This means that the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina needs an amendment; in addition to the full text, which is BHL 1428, there needs to be a BHL 1428b, which denotes the text where the first few chapters are missing.

As originally written, the “Life” began with a nervous-sounding letter of dedication to Wakelin, the tough new Norman bishop of Winchester, who was busy kicking the stuffing out of the cult of St Botulf there, and promoting the cult of St Swithun.  But none of the manuscripts in my hands contain this.  It was printed by Hardy a couple of centuries ago from an English manuscript that does, and I gave a translation of his text a while back.

It is no mystery why this would be omitted.  The manuscripts are divided into chunks, but without consistency.  What they often contain is “lectio i” or something like that.  These are texts being used for liturgical purposes.  A political letter from Folcard to Wakelin has no place in a liturgical compendium of Lives.

Nor is it a mystery why someone would choose to omit the opening chapters either.  These are about St Adulf, the brother of St Botulf, who doesn’t even appear until chapter 4.  It is unfortunate, but perhaps inevitable, that the creator of the new version felt able to mess with the text in small yet annoying ways.

The process of collation is also revealing D’Achery’s editorial changes, limited as these are.  None of them are worth retaining, I suspect.

Once I collate the Rooklooster manuscript, now in Vienna, I imagine that the changes in the Bollandist edition will also pop out.  Most likely these will all be dross, because they come from the shortened version.

To my great surprise, a PDF of the St John’s College Cambridge manuscript arrived today.  This appears to be a copy of the full text, and should therefore confirm much of what I already suppose.  Better yet, it even includes the dedicatory letter.  On the face of it, since nobody has got editorial with it, this ought to have a very pure text.  But we will see.

The lesson of today is to editors: please leave the text alone!  Transmit to us what you have.  Don’t “fix” it.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve spent the last couple of days collating manually the 1669 editio princeps d’Achery/Mabillon edition of the “Life” of St Botolph (BHL 1428) with manuscripts, first Cambridge Corpus Christi College, Parker 161; and then British Library Harley 3097.  Today I also compared my collation, at the points where differences were visible, with a vile microfilm scan of the “Codex Uticense” – i.e. the St Evroul manuscript – from the Bibliothèque Nationale Français, which was supposedly the basis for the d’Achery edition.

The results are interesting, but all three are fairly close together.

So it’s time to see what else is out there.  There’s a manuscript at St Johns College, Cambridge, MS 209.  I’ve just written to them, enquiring about getting photos.  The other manuscript is at Gray’s Inn in London.  Unfortunately I don’t have the folio numbers for this; only the starting number.

Going back to the St Evroul/Uticense/BNF manuscript, I find extracts from the medieval Office of St Botulph interleaved between the chapters.  Unfortunately the microfilm is so bad, the resolution so low, and the text so tiny, that it cannot really be read.  This is a pity, as it would have been nice to include these and translate them.

Curiously there is some Scandinavian material with Botulf material, and one article contains chunks of this material.  The article is remarkably diffuse, unfortunately.  More excitingly there is a fragment of the “Life” from a book binding somewhere.  I may have to write to the site to see this, tho.  It’s a parchment strip, cut from a page in order to bind a book.

Lots still to do.

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Working on MS Lincoln Cathedral Library 7

Posted on by Roger Pearse

On Monday I wrote to Lincoln Cathedral Library.  I wanted copies of three pages from their 12th century manuscript 7.  These contain a copy of the Life of St Botulph on folios 82r-83r.  The email bore speedy fruit, considering that Monday was a holiday.  On the Tuesday  Claire Arrand, the manuscript librarian, responded.  She advised me that she could take some photographs of the three pages for £15 (about $20), there and then, and that there was an admission charge of £25 ($33) if I came and did it myself in person.  I had made clear that smartphone photographs would be ideal, so long as I could read the text.  I gladly agreed, and the photographs arrived an hour or so later.  Frankly that was excellent service!

The images were marvellously clear, which was a nice change from fuzzy microfilm scans.  Here’s an excerpt from folio 82r, showing the start of the text.

There seems to be a tummy bug going around, and I have not escaped.  But yesterday and today, I took the d’Achery edition of the “Life”, which I have in Word format, and started to transcribe the photographs.  The idea is that I can do electronic comparison of the various witnesses to the text.

I must say that I have rather enjoyed it.  You feel far closer to the text once you do this.  The printed edition helps a lot with the abbreviations.  Although I have just noticed that, having opened the d’Achery word document a little while ago, to correct a typo, I got confused and started modifying that instead of my Lincoln file!  Luckily I am using Git to control both documents, and I can compare changes since the last commit and just revert.

Initially I ignored the punctuation, but as I progressed through it, I became aware that these are sense groups, intended for reading aloud, and therefore of value for the translation, a guide to how the medieval reader understood the text.  So now I shall go back and correct it again.

Interestingly the ancestor of the semi-colon is in use, the “punctus elevatus”, which looks like an upside-down semi-colon.  See for example column 1, line 6, after “fervore”:

The “full stop” appears to be a comma.  New sentences start with a capital – see “Erant” on line 8 in the first image.  I don’t know what the squiggle after “patrie sue” is!  The text is abbreviated.  The elevated “9” after words is “us”.  The “7” over “conusatione” is “er”, i.e. “conversatione”.  The next word starts with P with a squiggle, the abbreviation for “pro”.  Some very common words just get a macron, e.g. “gra” for “gratia”.

Here’s my transcription of the first column, with line breaks here in case anyone wants to compare:

Sancti Botulphi abbis. Lectio prima.
Beatus pater Botulphus divina
reservatus pietate, ut doctrina
& san­cta conversatione prodesset nativae
patriae suae, postquam Dei gratia, & divi­no
profecerat sanctae religionis fervore; disposuit
iam ad Angliam pro caritatis
studio repedare. Erant autem in eodem
monasterio quo morabatur, sorores duae
Ethelmundi regis, qui tunc australibus
praeerat anglis, quae diligebant­ praecipue

And a quick translation, since it is tedious to work with words that one does not understand:

Of Abbot Saint Botulph. First Lesson.
Blessed Father Botulph, preserved by divine piety, so that he might benefit his native country through his doctrine and holy way of life, after he had made progress by the grace of God, and by his divine fervor for holy religion, now resolved to return to England for the sake of doing good. Now in the same monastery where he was staying, there were two sisters of King Ethelmund, who then ruled over the southern English, who especially loved [Father Botulph].

How different is this from the d’Achery text? Not very, I think.  It’s quite close to the full text, and just missing chapters 1-3.  But it will be easier to see it, once I have done an electronic comparison.

Onward.

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