Armenian mss photographed in Syria by HMML

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via Paleojudaica I learn of an interesting article on the PanArmenian website.

PanARMENIAN.Net – Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at St. John’s University completed a manuscript preservation project in the Middle East shortly before the violence worsened in Syria, sctimes.com reports.

“This was our last current project in Syria, and we had done actually a series of projects – about six of them in Syria – in different locations,” said the Rev. Columba Stewart, executive director of the Collegeville-based library.

However, HMML-trained technicians in Aleppo, Syria, were able to complete the digitization of 225 Armenian manuscripts belonging to the Armenian Orthodox Diocese of Aleppo – one of the largest Armenian collections in Syria.

“We began the work before the current turmoil in Syria, and this particular project was finished just as the situation started to get bad in Aleppo, which had been quiet until fairly recently,” Stewart said during a call from Bethlehem. …

“We also work on Islamic projects, so our interests transcend particular denominations or religious groups because all of this handwritten manuscript heritage is really the heritage of all humankind,” Stewart said.

HMML has now completed a series of projects in Aleppo that have included important collections belonging to the Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholic and Greek-Catholic communities, for a total of 2,150 digitally preserved manuscripts. …

Adam McCollum is the lead cataloger of Eastern Christian manuscripts at HMML and will be responsible for getting the Armenian collection cataloged once it is at the HMML.

“Once the library has entered into a partnership with people who have collections of manuscripts, a studio is set up there with a digital camera, and entire manuscript collections are photographed and put onto hard drives and mailed back to us,” McCollum said.

One digital copy of the Armenian collection will stay with Bishop Shahan Sarkissian and the Armenian Orthodox Diocese of Aleppo. HMML will keep an additional digital copy of the collection in a highly secure location.

“The general populace in these places is still pretty safe – at least at this point – but we have no idea what’s going to happen in the future,” he said of HMML’s continuing work in Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, as well as in Ethiopia, southwest India and Malta.

I think that we must all wish this enterprise well.  HMML is doing a rescue job here, and a very necessary one. 

Before the first world war, scholars were very excited to discover that the “mountain Nestorians” in the Turkish empire, in what is now the north of modern Iraq and Iran, were still speaking Syriac.  It was discovered that they had preserved manuscripts of various important patristic works previously thought lost.  They were based in the mountains in order to resist Moslem attacks, mainly by Kurds.  American missionaries set up a base at Urmia and copied whatever they could access.  The Archbishop of Seert, Addai Scher, became a well-known scholar and collected a number of irreplaceable items, including a complete Syriac translation of Theodore of Mopsuestia’s lost work, De incarnatione, discovered in 1905 and unpublished.  

Then the war came, and the Turks orchestrated genocidal attacks on the Armenians in 1915, but also on Christians generally.  Scher was murdered and his library vanished, taking with it any chance that men could ever read De incarnatione.  The losses of manuscripts in that period were severe. 

Likewise the violence in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein once again led to Moslem violence against Christians, and the loss of cultural treasures.

The revolutions going on at the moment — and I have no idea what is truly happening there, and I don’t believe our media reports — are very likely to involve the destruction of irreplaceable material. 

The work of HMML in making copies of manuscripts is undoubtedly a wise precaution.

Armenian literature itself is much better known than Old Slavic, but simply cataloguing those manuscript, as Adam McCollum is to do, will itself make material more accessible. 

I once wanted to learn if there was any catena material in Armenian.  I was defeated by the fact that all the titles, in the catalogues of manuscripts that I consulted, were in Armenian script and so unreadable!  A web catalogue will not have this problem.

Yesterday the Slavicists were talking about the need for a Clavis listing all works and authors known in the language, and assigning each a numeric reference.  Is there a Clavis for classical Armenian, I wonder?  If not, why not?

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A Clavis for Old Slavic, and a site for Slavic Chrysostom material

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Alin Suciu is rapidly becoming one of the most important patristic bloggers.  His blog regularly announces finds of new material for Coptic.   But today’s post — a guest post by Yavor Miltenov — relates to Old Slavonic / Old Slavic.  It’s very exciting indeed!

As a result of the work of generations of philologists, the researchers in the field of Byzantine studies have at hand numerous index-catalogues dealing with classification of texts. The most recent and significant of them are, of course, Clavis patrum Graecorum, Bibliotheca hagiographica Graeca, Clavis apocryphorum Veteri Testamenti, Clavis apocryphorum Novi Testamenti, and many others – a centuries-old tradition, that serves as a base for these exceptional reference books. Any study on (or even related to) certain medieval literary monuments must as a rule consult them, as they cover an enormous material, facilitate identifications of certain works, offer standardization, unification and classification, contain the primary bibliography, and represent not only the basics of our knowledge about one particular text, but also give an opportunity to study groups of texts and corpora. Recently, the intensive research has even brought the process to further development – an online Clavis Clavium will be built upon the base of previous indexes[1].

Now this last snippet is itself very interesting!  The reference states:

[1] As announced by Caroline Macé and Gert Partoens from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven at a recent meeting in Sofia.

That is something that I would like to know more about!  But the article continues:

It is a well-known fact, that almost all medieval Slavic literary monuments (9th–16th c.) are translations from Byzantine works: whole miscellanies, single texts, excerpts used in compilations. In this sense, their adequate study is possible only if a comparison with the Byzantine originals is made. In Slavic medieval studies, however, there is no such instrumentum studiorum that contains a) classification of the translated texts and b) reference to their Greek originals[2]. For this main reason the Slavic tradition, unlike the Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, Coptic, is not “visible” to the researchers of the Byzantine cultural commonwealth, it is not fully reflected in the above-mentioned and other Claves[3], and, finally, remains isolated and thought more as a subject to be researched by the “national philologies”, than as a full member of the Byzantine-Slavic cultural space in the Middle Ages.

This is sound thinking.  And it is quite impossible for an interested amateur like myself to get any idea of what exists in this language group.  It’s like a different discipline, like trying to  go surfing on Mars!  And this should not be.

In 2011 the Bulgarian Science Fund announced a call for Young Scientists Program. I and four other colleagues decided to apply with a project entitled “Electronic database Operum patrum Graecorum versiones slavicae: cataloguing and study of the writings of John Chrysostom in Old Church Slavonic” with the kind institutional support of Central Library of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Surprisingly, we won a grant and the project has started in the beginning of 2012!

The aim of our initiative is to elaborate a freely accessible Internet-based electronic corpus of medieval Slavic translations and their corresponding Byzantine sources.

This is good news, and the online aspect is very good news!  This will certainly help Chrysostom scholars to engage with the Slavic versions.  But Dr Miltenov continues:

I should admit that the inspiration of our idea is the Pinakes database, worked out by the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes on the base of a card-index, developed for two decades in the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies in Toronto. So we have the model, we have some sources we may use[4], we know it will take years to input sufficient material and much more time to make text identifications of our own. We have in mind also that we have almost no base to build upon: most of the descriptions of Slavic manuscripts lack identifications of texts’ Byzantine originals, we do not have Patrologiae or series of critical editions (such as Sources Chrétiennes, Corpus Christianorum, etc.), and we have no previous experience with medieval Slavic text databases that are similar to ours.

This is why, being still in the beginning, we have to think about technical solutions and scientific criteria which will last. Our Clavis has to be supplied with bibliographic and specialized data, to be user friendly, to include opportunities for expansion, permanent upgrade and publication of various types of materials (Greek and Old Church Slavonic works, manuscript catalogues, articles, books, iconographic images, etc.). In this sense it is important to prepare carefully the appropriate software and to build a model for texts description that has all the necessary metadata. We are working on these methodological issues now and I hope I’ll be able to tell you more about the development of the project soon, here on Alin’s blog.

I’m looking forward to it.  A Clavis itself would be a wonderful thing.

The main enemy of this project will be the urge to be “perfect”.  This urge, to publish nothing until it is “just so”, has caused many a promising initiative to disappear.  I hope that they will remember that the best way to eat an elephant is to do so a little at a time!

Well done, Yavor, and thank you so much Alin for hosting it!

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Matthieu Cassin on the chapter titles of Contra Eunomium I

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the Sources Chretiennes edition of Gregory of Nyssa’s Contra Eunomium,[ref]Gregoire de Nysse, Contre Eunome I, SC 524, 2010: Greek text by W. Jaeger from WNO I.1, translation by Raymond Winling.[/ref] there is an annex which is of wider interest.  Annex II — p.359-364 — was written by Matthieu Cassin, and summarises rather nicely the question of indices and chapter titles in the manuscripts of this work. 

I know that French is a closed book to rather too many anglophone scholars, so, in the interests of wider access, here is my own English translation of portions of it. 

The kephalaia of book I

Immediately preceding the text of Contra Eunomium, the majority of the manucripts include a list of chapters of book 1, either as a summary or a table of contents.  The numbers of these chapters are then given in the margins of the text, at the location corresponding to the beginning of each chapter.  Some manuscripts, whether or not they preserve the table at the front, also give the title of the chapter, either in the body of the text or in the margin.  Finally others, which don’t include any portion of the chapters titles anywhere, still retain traces of marginal numerals.  The antiquity of this system of structuring the work is confirmed by the witness of the indirect tradition: in fact the Treatise against Damian written at the end of the 6th century by Peter of Callinicus, patriarch of Antioch, furnishes us with ample citations of the Contra Eunomium of Gregory, and specifies the chapter from which the passages come. These indications correspond, in the vast majority of cases, with the system which appears in the Greek manuscript tradition, except around the great lacuna in the later parts of the book. In fact the text which Peter knew had not yet suffered this loss, and the numbering accordingly had not been disturbed in this area by the loss of an important section of the text.

The following table gives in the first column the number of the chapter, in the second the paragraph where the chapter begins; if the latter does not begin at the start of a paragraph, the difference is signalled by + or – and specified in a note, giving page and line from the edition of W. Jaeger. The following columns, which each correspond to one of the witnesses of the text, indicate if the chapter mark is present (+) or absent (-) from the manuscripts, or if it has not been possible for me to determine its status (?); signalled by a ≠ is a reported difference from the norm. The indication ‘mut.’ is utilised when the manuscript is mutilated for this portion of the text; ‘lac.’ signals the lacuna of chapters 29-31.

The copies of manuscripts where the original is extant are not represented in this table, except for D, which allows us to fill in some of the lacunas of S. B. (Lesbiacus 6), to the extent that it gives a single chapter numeral (κβ’), on f. 340v, in its usual place in the text.

The manuscripts not cited do not include any indication of chapters: mostly these are recent copies, except for V (Vaticanus gr. 447, 12th c.). The latter manuscript, on the other hand, indicates the position of chapters for book III, and for the Refutation; the manuscript from which it was copied, like L, had undoubtedly deteriorated since it was written, and the marks of the chapters were no longer visible. Two manuscripts could not be consulted (Hagion Oros, Mone Vatopediou, 541; Sinai, Mone tes Aikaterines, Metochion 8). Another, equally inaccessible to me, signals the beginning of chapters and their numeral, according to the catalogue which describes it (Brescia, Bibl. civica Queriniana, A IV 3).

There then follow five pages of data on the chapters, which may be conveniently viewed in the SC edition itself. Dr Cassin resumes the story afterwards as follows:

The editio princeps of 1618, based upon recent manuscripts which did not specify the positions of the chapters, could not indicate them. Fr. Oehler, who was in a position to consult manuscripts which carried the numbers of the chapters in their margins, such as L or M, did not report them in his edition, which appeared in 1865. W. Jaeger, whose position on this point is less than clear, chose not to indicate their position, believeing that the manuscripts did not agree among themselves, even though he had access to the majority of the witnesses of the text.

All this is of great interest.

Firstly the work of Peter of Callinicus indicates that by the 6th century at least, the chapter titles were as we see them. Since the transmitted text is likewise equipped, this must be strong evidence that the titles, divisions, and numerals are authentic. Secondly the tendency of scribes to interfere with them seems to be shown — it’s not quite clear from the article — by tinkering with the numbering once a lacuna had appeared in chapters 29-31.

If the summary, the chapter titles, and the marginal numerals are all authorial — and it looks like it — then we have to ask whether this is an innovation by Gregory; or whether, in fact, he is merely adopting a trend active in his own time.

Speculating, I would suggest the latter.  Half a century earlier, Eusebius of Caesarea had given summaries in his Ecclesiastical History (doubtless based on earlier Greek histories which did the same), but also in his theological works like the Praeparatio Evangelica.  It is less clear whether these items had made it into the text, or whether there were numerals.  But who can say?  The influence of the EH on all Greek patristic literature means that possibly this was the catalyst.  Is it possible that the division of theological books into chapters with numbers and marked in the body of the text is a 4th century innovation?  And that it spreads to the Latin world in the 5-6th centuries?

How valuable the SC series is!  For increasingly I notice that they include a section of just what the manuscripts actually contain.  As Dr C. rightly observes, editors simply ignored this stuff.  Those days, thankfully, must be behind us.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I am cursing WordPress very much indeed.  I’ve just translated three pages of a French article, and written some comments of my own, pressed “publish”, and it then demanded I log in — to my own blog — again and discarded most of it.  That’s an hour of my life gone.  It’s almost beyond bearing.

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Stick with your work

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Some wise words from the Trevin Wax blog today:

Stick with your work.

Do not flinch because the lion roars.
Do not stop to stone the devil’s dogs.
Do not fool away your time chasing the devil’s rabbits.

Do your work.

Let liars lie.
Let sectarians quarrel.
Let critics malign.
Let enemies accuse.
Let the devil do his worst.

But see to it nothing hinders you from fulfilling with joy the work God has given you.

He has not commanded you to be admired or esteemed.
He has never bidden you defend your character.
He has not set you at work to contradict falsehood (about yourself)
which Satan’s or God’s servants may start to peddle,
or to track down every rumor that threatens your reputation.
If you do these things, you will do nothing else.
You will be at work for yourself and not for the Lord.

Keep at your work.
Let your aim be as steady as a star.
You may be assaulted, wronged, insulted, slandered,
wounded and rejected, misunderstood, or assigned impure motives;
You may be abused by foes, forsaken by friends,
and despised and rejected of men.
But see to it with steadfast determination,
with unfaltering zeal,
that you pursue the great purpose of your life and object of your being
until at last you can say, “I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do.”

– Anonymous

Of course on this blog we wonder who wrote it and where it comes from…

There’s an excellent article by Seth Barnes on Responding to unfair criticism; it appears in a comment to this.  A Google Books search reveals nothing before 1998.  It would be interesting to know the source.

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The Letter of Pilate to Tiberius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

One item that floats around the web is the Letter of Pilate to Tiberius.  It appeared in English translation in the Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 8 (here), and from there to all sorts of other places.  Another translation appears online in The Lost Books of the Bible, 1926[ref]Copied from the Cowper translation of 1867.  The introductory words may be found on Cowper, p.389, here.[/ref]

Here is the ANF translation:

The Letter of Pontius Pilate
Which He Wrote to the Roman Emperor, Concerning Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Pontius Pilate to Tiberius Caesar the emperor, greeting.

Upon Jesus Christ, whose case I had dearly set forth to thee in my last, at length by the will of the people a bitter punishment has been inflicted, myself being in a sort unwilling and rather afraid. A man, by Hercules, so pious and strict, no age has ever had nor will have. But wonderful were the efforts of the people themselves, and the unanimity of all the scribes and chief men and elders, to crucify this ambassador of truth, notwithstanding that their own prophets, and after our manner the sibyls, warned them against it: and supernatural signs appeared while he was hanging, and, in the opinion of philosophers, threatened destruction to the whole world. His disciples are flourishing, in their work and the regulation of their lives not belying their master; yea, in his name most beneficent. Had I not been afraid of the rising of a sedition among the people, who were just on the point of breaking out, perhaps this man would still have been alive to us; although, urged more by fidelity to thy dignity than induced by my own wishes, I did not according to my strength resist that innocent blood free from the whole charge brought against it, but unjustly, through the malignity of men, should be sold and suffer, yet, as the Scriptures signify, to their own destruction. Farewell, 28th March.

So what is this item?  The ANF introductory notice is very unhelpful.  New Testament Apocrypha[ref]W. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 2 vols, Eng. tr. 1991.[/ref] does not mention it at all.  Nor does a Google Books search produce much.

Fortunately I have on my shelves a copy of J. K. Elliot’s The Apocryphal New Testament[ref]J. K. Elliot, The Apocryphal New Testament, Clarendon 1993.[/ref] and this has a section on the apocryphal Pilate literature.  Our item appears on p.206-8.

The work is written in renaissance Latin, probably in the 16th century.[ref]Z. Izydorczyk, The Medieval Gospel of Nicodemus, Arizona, 1997, p.8, gives the following description: “Epistola Pilati ad Tiberium: Pilate reveals that he sentenced Christ partly through his own weakness but partly through his loyalty to the emperor. This letter, which again presents Pilate in a positive light, was written in Renaissance Latin, probably in the sixteenth century.” and “Geerard, Clavis no. 68; Starowieyski, Apokryfy, 476″. Online here.[/ref] The letter cannot be traced any earlier than the renaissance,[ref]Elliot, p.206.[/ref].  It was composed in Latin[ref]Elliot, p.207[/ref].

Tischendorf printed the Latin text,[ref]Tischendorf, Evangelia Apocrypha, Leipzig, (2nd) 1876, p.lxxvi-lxxviii, p. 433-4. Online here.[/ref] based on four witnesses, which he obtained from earlier publications:

  • Chas. — the text printed by Chassanaeus in part 4 of his catalogi gloriae mundi, 1571.
  • Flor. — the text printed by Florentinius in Martyrolog. vet. Hieronymi, p.113 (and reprinted by Fabricius).
  • Bodl. — the text printed by Abrah. Gronovius in the preface to his edition of the works of Tacitus in 1721, from an ms. or mss. of the works of Tacitus from the Bodleian library in Oxford.
  • Ven. — the text which Tischendorf himself obtained from a manuscript in Venice, Marcianus class. X. num. CXXXIV.  The ms. is 16th century.

The text had previously been edited by Fabricius[ref]J. A. Fabricius, Codex Apocryphus Novi Testamenti, 4 vols, Hamburg, 2nd ed., 1719. p.300-1.[/ref], Thilo[ref]J. C. Thilo, Codex Apocryphus Novi Testamentum, vol. i, Leipzig, 1832, p.801-2[/ref], and Giles[ref]J. A. Giles, Codex Apocryphus Novi Testamenti: The uncanonical Gospels and other Writings, London, 1852, vol. ii, p.14; so J.K.Elliot, but in the online copy of that work, I found that the reference did not seem to be correct.[/ref].

Note that the Letters of Pilate and Herod exist in a Syriac version of the 6-7th century,[ref]Texts and Studies, 5, p.xlviii.[/ref] but the Letter of Pilate to Tiberius is not  one of these.

The first English translation was made in 1867 by B.H.Cowper[ref]B.H.Cowper, The Apocryphal Gospels and Other Documents relating to the History of Christ, Edinburgh, 1867, p.398-9.  Cowper tells us, p.xx, that he is translating Tischendorff.  There is no introduction to the “Epistle of Pontius Pilate” in Cowper.[/ref], followed by that of Walker in the ANF in 1870.[ref]A. Walker, Apocryphal Gospels, Acts and Revelations, Ante-Nicene Christian Library vol. 16, Edinburgh, 1870.  The Ante-Nicene Fathers series is a rearranged and pirated US edition of the Edinburgh series.[/ref]  Another translation appeared in 1915 from A. Westcott.[ref]A. Westcott, The Gospel of Nicodemus and Kindred Documents, London, 1915, p.119-20. I was unable to access this, but possibly US readers may be able to do so, in which case I should be glad of a copy.[/ref]

A Google search reveals an “epistola Pilati” is contained in the British Library ms. Cotton Titus D. xix, on f.88-89, but this is probably the epistola Pilati ad Claudium.[ref]A catalogue online here, where the work follows the Gospel of Nicodemus.  Compiled by Nigel Ramsay, who gives a bibliography including, “The Gospel of Nicodemus. Gesta Salvatoris, ed. H.C. Kim (Toronto, 1973), chapter xxviii. [Epistola Pilati.]”[/ref]

There is also a Letter of Tiberius to Pilate, in Greek.[ref]Epistola Tiberii ad Pilatum. Edited in Texts and Studies, second series, vol. 5, 1893.  Introduction on p.xlix-l; Greek text on p.77-82.[/ref] This also is a late production, not earlier than the 11th century.  This takes an unfavourable view of Pilate and alludes to a journey by Mary Magdalene to Rome to accuse Pilate.[ref]See this post on this letter.[/ref]

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Advertising Standards Authority threatens the Cranmer blog

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Advertising Standards Authority, a minor government body which exists to stop dodgy businessmen running dishonest adverts, has started to engage in some curious activity lately.  For instance it recently told a Christian group that it couldn’t mention God’s healing powers on its website (why?). Of course there must be some specific person — an atheist, perhaps? — responsible.  I wonder just who the evil-doer is?

Today I learn via the eChurch blog that the ASA has decided to threaten the Cranmer blog, on the grounds that an advert that appeared on his site supporting marriage is “homophobic”. 

Oh, and they demanded that he keep quiet about the threats.  Being a brave man, he rightly told them to go to hell.  Bullies love silence!

I do hope that this is raised in Parliament.  The ASA clearly needs reform, once it starts behaving like the Gestapo.  For there can be no free speech, when this kind of thing is going on.

Read the post in which Cranmer — well done! — blows the gaff on this.  The tone of the communication from the ASA is sickening.

Apparently there have been a number of complaints about one of the advertisements His Grace carried on behalf of the Coalition for Marriage. He has been sent all manner of official papers, formal documentation and threatening notices which demand answers to sundry questions by a certain deadline. He is instructed by the ‘Investigations Executive’ of this inquisition to keep all this confidential.

Since His Grace does not dwell in Iran, North Korea, Soviet Russia, Communist China or Nazi Germany, but occupies a place in the cyber-ether suspended somewhere between purgatory and paradise, he is minded to ignore that request. Who do these people think they are?

In the US and Canada, it is a recognised form of attack on someone to denounce them for their opinions to some officious “human rights” body, which will then solemnly harass them for months or years for daring to say something inoffensive.  In real courts people are considered innocent until found guilty; in the kangaroo courts like the ASA, they are guilty until they can prove that they are innocent of Wrong Thinking.  And so, we see, Cranmer is required to “justify” what he wrote. 

In this process, it matters not whether the victim is found guilty — because “the process is the punishment”, as Ezra Levant — himself attacked in this way — put it.  Few will dare to volunteer for months or years of harassment, merely for expressing an opinion.

It reminds me of the bad old days in the reign of Charles II, when Samuel Pepys was kept hanging on and hanging on under arrest, by his political enemies, who simply kept deferring the hearing (at which, in the end, he was found not guilty of being inclined to Roman Catholic opinions — the ridiculous charge made against him).

So … who was it that denounced this UK blogger to the authorities?  Well, we’re not told.  Anonymous accusations … the lovely fruit of the hater and the bigot.

The ‘Issue’ here is that 24 anonymous complainants, ‘including the Jewish Gay & Lesbian Group’ (doubtless disclosed to give weight to the allegations), challenged whether the claim ‘70% of people say keep marriage as it is’. However, His Grace is not required to respond to that point, since he did not conduct the research. But it transpires that 10 of these 24 complainants objected that the ads were ‘offensive’ and ‘homophobic’, and he is requested to respond to these allegations ‘under CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 and 3.3 (Misleading advertising), 3.7 (Substantiation) and 4.1 (Harm and offence)’.

And so the punishment begins. 

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been trying to get into a mass of material about chapter titles that Matthieu Cassin has kindly sent me.  I hope to blog about some of this over the next few days.  In particular he has located scholarly material which tries to develop some criteria for the authenticity of these things.  This certainly sounds very interesting to me!

But blogging will be light for a bit, for a daft reason.  You see, for the last few weeks I’ve been working out of a hotel.  The hotel has an air-conditioning system which has the kind habit of generating noise at regular intervals, thereby waking me up every four hours during the night.  Somehow it manages to do this, even when turned off by the room switch. 

It’s remarkably difficult, after a while, to concentrate on anything, under the effect of that treatment.  This weekend, indeed, I was almost drunk with tiredness.  Why is it, I wonder, that it is nearly impossible to get a good night’s sleep in any hotel with which I am familiar?  In an type of establishment that exists for no other purpose than to supply sleeping chambers for rent?

So of course I have not got very far with the material in Latin and German. 

The hotel have promised me that tonight the problem will not recur.  So … cross your fingers for me! 

And let’s laugh at the absurdity … for this, friends, is the stuff of life; the things that we spend our lives on, while planning to do something else!

I saw this evening that Mark Goodacre was commenting on the curse that email has become to many scholars.  I’m luckier than most, in that I tend to get a reply eventually.  But I too get a fair amount of email myself; but then I try to handle each email only once, and reply as soon as I read it.  I do not envy him, tho.

But some emails are blessed.  One email this evening cheered me more than I can say.  It showed that God had heard some prayers of mine, made every Monday for many years, and answered them fully.  Very cheered by this.

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Gregory of Nyssa on chapter titles

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In his work De hominis opificio (On the making of man), in the praefatio, Gregory alludes explicitly to a list of chapter titles for the work:

…and for clearness’ sake I think it well to set forth to you the discourse by chapters, that you may be able briefly to know the force of the several arguments of the whole work.[ref]PG 44, col. 128B.  English translation from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, which then inserts a translation of the chapter headings which do not appear at this position in the Greek text of Migne.[/ref]

The Greek text of Migne does not print any chapter titles, but the English translators embedded them following this sentence.

The word rendered “chapters” is, of course, kephalaia.  Here at least we see that Gregory is familiar with the idea of a work which may be summarised in this way. 

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Ancient texts with “indices”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A little while ago a kind correspondent sent me a partial list of ancient works where the manuscripts contain “indices”, or “tables of contents” of the chapters or subjects covered in the book or books. 

I had meant to go and investigate each of these, but my work life is eating all my time at the moment.  However the list is well worth publishing as it is (i.e. before I mislay it!):

Pline l’Ancien, Naturalis Historia livre I. C’est l’exemple le plus célèbre. L’auteur est évidemment Pline.

Valerius Maximus, Facta et dicta memorabilia, édition Briscoe, 2 vols., Teubner Stuttgart et Leipzig, 1998. Je ne sais pas si la récente édition de la Loeb contient les indices. Les éditions plus anciennes ne comportent pas les indices.

Hygin, Fabulae (ed. Schmidt sur Google)

Jérôme, De Viris Inlustribus et Gennadius, De Viris Inlustribus (ed. Richardson et Gebhardt, Texte und untersuchungen 14, 1896). Sur Google.

Florus, Epitomae Libri II, ed. Rossbach, Teubner 1896 (sur Google), ou édition de la collection Loeb.

Cassius Dio, Histoire Romaine, édition Boissevain, tomes 1-3 (sur Archiv.org). Les indices sont conservés pour les livres 37-59 et 80 (à vérifier dans le détail). Ils sont aussi dans l’édition de la Loeb.

Eusèbe de Césarée, Histoire ecclésiastique

Eusèbe de Césarée, Vie de Constantin

John of Nikiu, traduction anglaise Charles, 1916 (site Roger Pearse)

Fréchulf (orthographe très variable) de Lisieux, Historiae (début du 9e siècle), édition Allen, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis CLXIX et CLXIX A, Brepols 2002. N’est évidemment pas sur Internet. L’édition de la Patrologie de Migne (PL 106) ne contient pas les indices. Le meilleur manuscrit, de Saint-Gall, contemporain de l’auteur, contient les indices et se trouve sur Internet. Les indices sont sûrement de l’auteur.

Orose, Adversus paganos. Les éditions de Zangemeister, CSEL 1882 et Teubner 1889 (toutes les deux sur Archiv.org) donnent des indices différents.

Cassiodore, Variae, édition Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica

Cassiodore, Institutiones, édition Sir Roger Mynors

Cassiodore, Historia ecclesiastica, édition Hanslik 1952. Absente sur Internet …

Isidore de Séville, Etymologiae, ed. Lindsay, Oxford, OCT 1911 (2 volumes). A consulter par exemple sur le site de la « Bibliotheca Augustana ».

Grégoire de Tours, Historia Francorum (Monumenta Germaniae Historica)

Frédégaire, Chronique (Monumenta Germaniae Historica). Plusieurs indices.

I hope to investigate each of these, bit by bit.

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