From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still full of cold, but I have been trying to get back to the keyboard. In fact I have managed to proof the OCR output for the first chunk — very small chunk! — of Ibn Abi Usaibia, and confirmed to myself that it’s doable.  Working on this, therefore, will be a nice winter project. 

It’s not been too difficult, as there are not a lot of strange characters so far.  The translator has indicated long vowels with an overscore, and some t’s and d’s and s’s with a dot underneath.  I do wonder whether they are all necessary.  Is it really necessary to write “Allah” with an overscore over the second ‘a’?

An email has arrived from my friends at Les éditions du Cerf, confirming that they forgot to purchase from the editor the supposed copyright in the Greek text of the ecloge of Eusebius’ Gospel Problems and Solutions.  So I don’t owe them a royalty for using it in my book.  Not that the royalty was in any way oppressive — they were very decent folk, charged very little, and I highly recommend them to anyone who needs to reprint a text from the Sources Chrétiennes series.  But this scam among academic publishers, of claiming copyright of the original text of a modern edition of some ancient author, is so widespread that they doubtless feel obliged to do the same, and no blame to them.  It seems that Claudio Zamagni, the editor, retains ownership of any putative rights over the Greek text, and I know that he doesn’t believe that such a copyright should morally exist.  I agree with him there, as I have said before.  This also removes any legal obstacle to me placing the whole PDF of the book online when the time comes.  So everyone wins, and I will find some way to make a donation to the SC so they don’t lose out either.

Meanwhile I’m having some interesting times dealing with orders for the book via book-dealers.  One Italian bookshop ordered a copy ages ago, but has yet to pay.  Another Dutch bookshop seems better, but still no cash.  I think that I will go over to the system of requiring payment in advance, for anything else seems to make work and worry.  I’ve posted notices of the appearance of the book in a couple of online fora.

Annoyingly, I’m still too full of cold to sit at my computer much, and I am getting very tired of sitting around.  Isn’t it infuriating to be prevented from doing anything by a miserable cold virus?!  To have millions of useful, interesting and enjoyable things to do, and to feel too unwell to do any of them?  But I am mildly cheered to discover that during his 40’s C. S. Lewis — whose letters I am still reading — changed from having flu once a year to once a term, and started getting lumbago.  “At least I do better than that!” I thought to myself.  I think Lewis became old quite early, and indeed died at age 65 after ten years of illnesses.  In a letter he remarks that in his family this was normal.  Most of us will be more fortunate, I think. 

It is interesting that he allowed the ‘duty’ of correspondence with strangers to occupy so much of his time, after he became known through his broadcast talks on the BBC.  I think that he should probably have been rather more hard-hearted in this.  It is a warning to all of us, that we probably should ignore more emails than we do.  He also made the classic mistake of taking on domestic servants in order to find them a job — as being ‘deserving’ — rather than for their efficiency.  As a result he lived in continual discomfort.  The abolitionist William Wilberforce committed the same error, and with the same results. 

Talking of old age, I had a magazine come through my door from a professional organisation to which I belong.  This had an article on pensions, written by some financial advisor type.  It suggested, risibly, that to give the sort of income he thought adequate, most of us should be paying into our pensions something between 2,000-3,000 GBP a month.  I can’t imagine anyone in a position to do this, in these straitened times, and I certainly am not one of them.  But probably the man who wrote it hoped to gain a percentage commission of these vast sums, and chose his numbers accordingly. 

I’m currently still reading the collected letters of C. S. Lewis — volume 2, not volume 3, as I mistakenly supposed yesterday.  One author whom he quotes with great approval is Novalis.  I remember, many years ago, going into a German bookshop in Munchen-Gladbach and coming out with a copy of Heinrich von Ofterdingen.  But my German is wretched, and I could make nothing of it.  The interesting thing is that I don’t think Lewis’ German was that great either — although he refers to reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales in the original, and finding that there were about five times as many in that language, and many very sinister or sad.  But if so, how did he read Novalis?  Or is there an English translation, unbeknownst to me?

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Eusebius update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This evening I had an email from a French journal, asking for a review copy of the Eusebius, Gospel Problems and Solutions book.  They seem very reputable, and I suspect the enquiry comes thanks to my friends in the Francophone world — thank you all.  I’ve placed the order, and they should get it in a fortnight.

Meanwhile this has spurred me to send 6 copies of the hardback to Les editions du Cerf.  This was part of my deal with them, for permission to use Claudio Zamagni’s Greek text.  Admittedly the copyright position on this is less clear than it was — they may not actually legally own the text (and morally they should not, in my opinion).  But I did agree to this part of the deal, and they have been very helpful and easy to deal with.  So the copies are on their way.  With luck they will encourage more interest still in French circles.

I’m reasonably happy with sales so far, in the first two months, but of course we’re nowhere near break-even point yet.  I do need to market it a bit more as well.

By the way, if you are one of those kindly people who has bought a copy, please feel free to add reviews on Amazon!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There are times when all of us need a certain kind of book to read.  It should be a shapeless, gentle, unexciting but mildly interesting book, that requires little concentration.  It should be the kind of book that you can dip into anywhere, and leave off reading at any time.  It is the sort of book that a man lying under a blanket with a cold can read when alert enough to do so. 

It will surprise few, then, that I have been reading such a book.  The cold that I currently have is making me rather dopey for some reason.  Two examples: I managed to drive into a parked car at the weekend, luckily without damage on either side.  And an email from my work today tells me that I even forgot to invoice my client for last month, meaning that I wouldn’t get paid!  So like a child, perhaps I’d better be careful around sharp objects right now!  (If the cold has left me that muddle-headed, I’d better be.)  Isn’t it strange that a little virus should be so disabling to such a complex and wonderful machine as a man?

Since yesterday I have been reading volume 3 of the collected letters of C. S. Lewis, covering the 1930’s onwards.  It is a mighty volume; indeed much too big a volume.  I think that it tests the patience even of the most enthusiastic Lewisian, in truth. 

Collections of letters can be interesting or dull.  I was given the letters of Jane Austen a year or two back, which I found unreadable.  The editor had evidently forgotten that most people will know nothing of her life, and will need clear footnotes to link the letters into a story.  Much as I love Austen’s novels — indeed I reread Pride and Prejudice at the weekend, with great enjoyment — I donated the book to a charity shop.  The letters of Lamb are said to be good, but I have not read them.  I wonder which other English letter-writers I should read?

The Lewis letters are variable, as might be expected, but there is still much that is new, along with much that is of no real importance any more.  An example of the former is a clergyman who turns out to be the possessor of an original letter from Dr Johnson to Mrs Thrale — I did not know that uncollected examples still existed –, and the footnote says that on his death it passed to Lewis, who in turn willed it to Pembroke College.

I’ve just read a couple of letters in which Lewis is reading Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott. It’s in nine volumes, and I have not read more than a page or two from some online PDF.  Indeed searching for the post in which I last referred to this work, I find that it too was sparked by reading this same volume of Lewis.  Was it really three and a half years ago, when I last read this book?  Ah, how the years fly by!

Lewis tells us that Boswell’s Life of Johnson is the best literary biography in English, and I believe it.  The two volume Everyman edition has stood on my shelves for many years.  Indeed I bought it second-hand, with tattered dustjacket, probably during the 80’s or 90’s from some local bookshop.  I took it to the now-vanished Amberstone Bookshop in Upper Orwell Street here in Ipswich, and they got some kind of plastic cover put around it, which helped preserve the dustjacket.  I often used to visit that shop, back in the days before Amazon was heard of, and looked over all their stock of fantasy novels.  Boswell has often enlightened a dull day.  I heard of his book through the essays of Augustine Birrell, a true Boswellian, and yearned to read it before I ever did.

Not that I begin at the start of the book.  The younger days of Johnson — or anyone — are of no real interest to me, I find.  Tales of childish precocity do not seem very appealing.  It is the man we wish to meet.  Indeed I usually feel the same about chapters headed “Last days”.  By that point the things that made a writer special have usually ceased to be, and peering into a sick room is never very edifying or cheering. 

Instead I always open the first volume part way through, and find Johnson as a young man, come to London, in great poverty, and just issuing his London, a poetic version of one of Juvenal’s Satires.  I’ve never read the poem through, but always remember his description of the sharp-elbowed competition, hungry for advancement and professing every skill:

All sciences a fasting monsieur knows,
And bid him go to hell; to hell he goes!

It is not so different today, working in modern IT, I think, and competing for work with every IT graduate that modern India can send.

But returning to Lockhart, I would quite like to sample his book.  However I find myself rather reluctant to buy something in ten volumes!  Perhaps one could borrow a volume from the local library, although I do wonder whether the infantilised libraries of today hold such books.  The frequency of sales of “unborrowed books” suggests that such may long since have been disposed of.  And an online search confirms that this staple of Victorian England is not to be found in Suffolk libraries.

A look on www.abebooks.co.uk tells me that a one-volume abridgement exists in the old Everyman series.  Perhaps I should buy one of those.  Thankfully the print-on-demand merchants like Kessinger have not filled up the search with cheap and abominable reprints, so I can see what there is for sale.  But that also confirms that Lockhart is no longer read. 

Indeed Lewis praises Lockhart in two letters.  But it is telling that he didn’t finish the book, but was “obliged to lay it aside” and did not return to it. 

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve decided to have a go at OCR’ing Ibn Abi Usaibia myself, now I have established that the OCR quality is not really that bad.  I’ve taken the first 195 pages and divided that up into 4 Abbyy Finereader projects, of 50 pages each (well, 3 lots of 50 and one lot of 45).  I’ve also customised the English language recognition by creating a new language “English and Arabic” and adding a bunch of vowels with overscores etc to it.  It works reasonably well, I find. 

This should be a relaxing thing to work on in the coming weeks, as it gets colder.  There is no actual rush to get it done, after all.  I’ve cancelled the job I placed at PeoplePerHour.com — there were some good and interesting quotes, but I will enjoy doing it myself. 

But I can’t do much with it at the moment — too full of cold and too muzzy-headed today.

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Google “lobbying hard” to change UK’s backward copyright law

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An interesting snippet at political blog Guido Fawkes:

Back in July the Sunday Times’s FOIs revealed that senior Downing Street officials have had over twenty meetings with Google since the election. Accusations of preferential treatment were thrown around when Hilton, whose wife is a Google VP, did not declare all of his meetings with the group. This is especially murky given that Google are lobbying hard for changes to UK copyright law. Now they have poached a key cog in Cameroon machine. It’s all rather too cosy for Guido’s liking.

The political gossip is of no importance to us — but if Google has really decided to lobby against the UK’s oppressive and publisher-greed-driven copyright laws, then this is excellent news.  Prime Minister David Cameron has already acknowledged that Google could never have come into existence in the UK.  You don’t get much more business-unfriendly than that!

Here’s hoping that the blocking of Google Books to British people — a block which exists because of publishing industry threats, purely in case some squitty publisher somewhere is deprived of the chance to make a dishonest and tiny buck on a book published before 1923 — will get deep-sixed, and that our copyright law will be reformed in a sensible direction.

None of us object to the creators of original work being able to profit from their labours.  But with copyright of life-plus-70 years, we are in the absurd situation where material that was printed in the Austro-Hungarian empire in Latin in 1893 by a publisher that no longer exists in a country that no longer exists by someone dead 60 years cannot legitimately go online in the UK because of quite spurious copyright.  The dog in the manger is not a figure who should be protected by law.

(My apologies to anyone expecting emails from me today.  I have an appalling cold and will not be doing anything much.)

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Getting Ibn Abi Usaibia into electronic form

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Some time back I discovered that in 1956 the US government commissioned a translation of the great history of medicine by the medieval Arabic writer Ibn Abi Usaibia.  The translation completed by Arabist Lothar Kopf in Israel, was filed, and forgotten.  I discovered that it existed quite by accident when I was doing a Google search for something — anything — on this author.  It’s almost certainly public domain as well.

Yesterday, to my astonishment, a DVD with photographs of all the pages of the typescript appeared through my letter box.  The photographs were taken by Douglas Galbi, who read my notes about this on my blog, hied down to the US National Library of Medicine to take a look, and — we should all thank him! — did the back-breaking task of photographing the whole lot! 

Looking at the images — which are better than I would have managed! — I grew rather excited.  A very large proportion of the material covers the classical and patristic period.  The translation is obviously a very sound piece of work, as you can tell at once by reading it.  This is a text that begs to be online.

I converted these into 7 PDF’s — the translation is almost 1,000 pages — and have sent a copy to Adam McCollum, Librarian of the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library.  Adam is an excellent Arabist, and interested in the author.  He’s promised to take a look and verify the general standard of the translation, and also whether it includes all the material in the Arabic text.

Meanwhile we really need something other than a gigabyte of PDF’s.  I was in negotiation with the NLM for a copy, and we’ll see where that goes.  In a sense it’s unnecessary now; but something monochrome and rather smaller might still be useful.

I’ve also posted a job on PeoplePerHour.com to see if I can hire some data entry skills.  I’m offering 40 GBP for 100 pages.  I did look at OCR, but OCR software tends not to like typescript, and the number of errors was sufficiently high that I’d rather someone else corrected it.  Alas, the days when I could do such things myself seem to be gone, and I just do not have the time.

UPDATE: I have modified the job, which has yet to be submitted, hours later.  It looks as if no-one on PeoplePerHour works at the weekend!  The delay is rather unwelcome, but useful in this case.  Because I have tried OCR again, and got rather better results.  The images that I first tried at the start of the book were not as good as those later on.  This book is OCR-able, so I have revised the ad with that in mind.  Eight hours at £5 an hour ought to cover quite a lot of OCR proof correction.  Although I do have a memory of once trying to hire people, long ago, and being disappointed at how slow they were.  Hum.  Maybe I will do this after all.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A couple of interesting articles have come my way today.

Tommaso Leoni has written an overview of the textual transmission of the works of Josephus.[1]  This reads rather like a summary of secondary literature, rather than a piece of new research, but, since much of that literature is in languages which anglophone scholars tend to avoid, I suspect his article will be very useful and will be the unacknowledged basis for much new work. 

In particular he highlights the value of the indirect transmission, via lengthy quotations in authors like Josephus.  There is also a valuable discussion of the Latin material.  I was delighted to see a reference to my friend Wade Blocker’s pioneering translation of ps.Hegesippus, which I uploaded at his request back in 2005. 

Now I’ve written digests of material about the manuscripts online myself, so some of the material is familiar to me, but one section of the article caught my eye:

The complexities of the manuscript tradition become obvious if we consider a most interesting piece of evidence, the only papyrus of Josephus, Pap. Graec. Vindobonensis 29810, published by Hans Oellacher in 1939. It is a fragment, unfortunately in poor condition, containing the text of War 2.576-579, 582-584 (overall, no more than 112 words in whole or in part). Despite its brevity, which makes it unwise to draw general conclusions about the quality of the other extant witnesses, the importance of this papyrus should not be underestimated, since it goes back to the late third century C.E., and thus it antedates the oldest manuscripts by more than six hundred years. Th e most striking aspect of P. Vindob. G. 29810 is that it diff ers conspicuously from all the manuscripts collated by Niese and Destinon, showing no clear similarities with the group PA, nor with the group VRC. Th is fact suggests—as Louis H. Feldman has rightly pointed out—that even the text of the War, which is usually believed to be in much better shape than that of the Antiquities, is less secure than Niese had supposed and still in need of further emendation. 

Interesting, but perhaps not unexpected.  The Greek mss. are all 10th century or later, and doubtless derive from one or two uncial copies extant a century earlier.  But the papyrus could easily be a ‘wild’ text, for all we know.  It would be interesting  to learn more.

The other article was a discussion of the so-called Mithras liturgy,[2] in reality one of a number of spells contained in a Greek magical codex (PGM IV) which used the name of Helios Mithras as one of the power-names.  Stoholski’s article is useful to the general reader since it provides something of a summary of the state of the question on the value and content of the material, before going on to discuss the presence of extracts from the Iliad before and after it.  This latter question is only of specialist interest, but the summary was useful.

In other news, a DVD with photographs of an interesting unpublished public domain translation came through my letter box this morning.  I made up some PDF’s of the photos, checked that I had all the material, and added some bookmarks.  More about this when I have got past some curious political issues.  But what I will need, I think, is someone to enter the text into a Word document.  It’s too long for me to do, and OCR doesn’t handle typescript that well.

A second European bookseller ordered a copy of the Eusebius book from Chieftain Publishing today.  This is nice to see.  Meanwhile the statements of sales for August (all via Amazon) appeared, and were reasonable, if not spectacular.  Not much sign of new orders following the Patristics Conference, tho.  It reminds me that I need to do some marketing of the paperback.  I just have not had the time.

I also started thinking about the possible content of the new Mithras article that I want to put online, and some technical ideas on how it might be done.

But I’m much too full of cold today to do very much.  All the same, I thought that I would share these articles with you.  It was a beautiful day, cool in the morning but red-hot 26C at lunch.  I know that September often involves a lot of sunny weather.  Here’s hoping!

[1] Tommaso Leoni, The text of Josephus’ works: an overview, Journal for the Study of Judaism 40 (2009) 149-184.
[2] Mark Stoholski, “Welcome to Heaven, Please Watch Your Step”: The “Mithras Liturgy” and the Homeric Quotations in the Paris Papyrus, Helios, Volume 34, Number 1, Spring 2007, pp. 69-95.

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Musing about Mithras

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email from my old Wikipedia account alerted me to some pointless dispute going on there. So this evening I went onto the account and shut off further emails and made sure the account was dead.  There is no purpose in sensible people attempting to contribute to Wikipedia, since it is really a collection of hearsay edited mainly by teenagers with loads of time, no judgement, not much education and nothing better to do.  Any malicious teenager with a grudge and no morals can simply delete your work, and hijack your efforts to tell a lie; and sooner or later, however obscure the subject on which you write, one of them will do so.  A couple of such villains wrecked the Mithras article some time back.  Such children tend to believe simultaneously that Wikipedia is the highest and most reliable authority on all subjects; and that it is perfectly OK for them to change it, in their ignorance, to say whatever they want it to say.  Such confusion of mind is rather charming, really.

But in the couple of years that I was maintaining the Wikipedia Mithras article, I acquired quite a stock of solid knowledge of the scholarship — unusual for me, since I spend most of my time with primary sources — and I have been musing on whether I should digest that knowledge into a page, or perhaps several pages, on my site.  It might be useful to people if I did.  Obviously I have copies of my work, so could base it on the last honest version of the Wikipedia article.

I’m not sure that I want to do it in quite the same format, tho.  Also the content and approach might be different.  In the Wikipedia article, before it was wrecked, I took the view that I would express no opinion of my own, and simply allow the scholars — people who publish peer-reviewed material and specialise in Mithras studies — to speak, and I would verify, even then, what they said and omit it if it was not backed by adequate primary sources.  The curse of Mithras studies is the waffly hearsay that goes around, and such a severe approach is quite necessary for anyone who wishes to know the facts.

But on my own pages I could, perhaps, express my own opinions.   The difficulty with this, however, is that I am not a scholar, and, ultimately, my opinions are worthless to the reader.   What I had in mind, rather, is to put up an image of a tauroctony and explain its parts and features.  This, surely, would be useful to anyone who sincerely wanted to know about Mithras, and something that I could do from my own knowledge. 

I’m also not quite sure how the page should be structured.  I like a fairly flat structure, and perhaps the system of tabs used by the Wikimedia software should be adapted.  I’ve also learned rather more about Persian Mitra than I knew back then — I was starting to prepare to rewrite that Wikipedia article, but won’t do so now — and possibly there should be something connected to that.

Nor was everything in the article, as I left it back in February, all of the same standard.  I verified everything that I could, of course, and tried to ensure balance, comprehensiveness and accuracy.  But some of the material was really not very interesting to me, and I didn’t really go into it.  Possibly I should omit that material.

We’ll see.  I have many other things to do, and in truth my life offline at the moment prevents me taking on any real projects online right now.  I will mull it over. 

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Arabic biographies of Mohammed – Brockelmann’s bibliography

Posted on by Roger Pearse

More than a month ago I obtained paper copies of Brockelmann’s great but flawed reference volumes on Arabic literature.  Seeing only a page or two on the Arabic biographers of Mohammed, I was moved to try to scan these, and then turn them into English. 

Well, it’s been one heck of a fight!  The abbreviations were incomprehensible, and the material so densely packed that even Brockelmann himself got confused about his number sequences (I have seen two cases so far where his numeration of works by an author gets out of sync), and his text was evidently unreadable to his typesetters as well.  Worse yet, there is no obvious way to merge the data in the “supplement” with the main text. 

But I did it.  And the material is now online, here.  Enjoy, if you can!

It’s not quite finished.  That’s because I simply couldn’t understand some parts of it.  My German is weak, and my knowledge of Arabic literature and the bibliography for it is non-existent.  But I did what I could.

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Manuscripts of the catena of Nicetas

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The PDF is a useful thing.  If you have a copy of the editor software, Adobe Acrobat, you can do many useful things.  I got hold of Sickenberger’s study of the catena of Nicetas a couple of days ago.  Because I had Acrobat, I added a set of bookmarks for the bits I wanted.  I translated them, as and where necessary.  In the process I started to gain an overview of the work.  I also OCR’d it, which gives me the means to use Google translate to work on the content.  I also have Christophe Guignard’s French description, which helps a lot!

The catena of Nicetas on Luke, as you remember, is a medieval commentary on the Gospel of Luke, composed entirely of chains (catenae) of quotations from the Fathers.  It was probably written between 1100-1105, although Sickenberger thinks 1080 AD.  A list of the manuscripts in which it may be found — for it has never been published — is something that I have long wanted to have.    As someone more used to dealing with texts composed in antiquity, I find that it is quite strange to find an extant copy so close to the date of composition!

A. Mss. of the complete catena

1) The oldest and most complete manuscript is the Vaticanus graecus 1611 (= V), written in 1116-7 AD.  It is written on parchment, 38.5 x 30 cm, and contains 320 folios.  The end is missing, however, as are two quires from the interior.  But originally it contained the whole catena, and nothing else.  The catena is divided into four books, and the date on which each was begun and completed is given in the colophon to each book, except, of course, for the last where the loss of the end portion includes the loss of its colophon.  The copying was started on 11 June 1116 and book 3 was completed on 19 May 1117.  The page layout is unusual, however.  The text is laid out on each page in the shape of the Greek letter Π.  At the top of each page, the text is given in 12 lines in a single column of full page width.  But then it splits into two columns, initially of 28 lines each but increasing as the manuscript goes on to 29 from fol. 168, and then to 30 from fol. 201.  The names of the authors of each extract are given in red ink.  These are placed usually in the margin, but sometimes in the body of the text.  Red ink is also often used for initials, and for text quoted from the gospel.  The book hand is a cursive minuscule, probably all by one person.  There are numerous abbreviations, some of which are expanded in the margins by a second hand of the same period.  There are some corrections by the copyist himself, but in general the copy was made with great care.  A more recent hand added an index on fol. 1v.  Opinions vary as to the origin of the manuscript.   There seems to be a link with the monastery of Rossano in southern Italy, founded in the 12th century AD, but it may have been brought there from Constantinople by the abbey’s founder, Bartholomew de Simeri.  This is the manuscript used by Angelo Mai for his extracts of Eusebius and other authors in the 1820’s, and is undoubtedly the most important.

2) Paris Coislinianus 201 (C), paper, 15th century, contains the whole catena on 605 folios, 28.5 x 21.5 cms, each of 35 lines.  The author names were written in red in the margin, but are now very pale.  The division into books is not retained.  The text is so clear that despite its recent date Sickenberger considered the manuscript more usable than any other for text critical purposes (presumably in the absence of an edition).  This manuscript also contains the 57 extracts from Hesychius, and seems to be a descendant of the Iviron ms., judging from various features of the text.

3) Athos Iviron 371 (I) and manuscript 466 of the Metochion of the holy sepulchre of Constantinople, now in the National Library of Greek in Athens, are two halves of what was once one manuscript, parchment, 12-13th century, 24.5 x 19 cms.  The Iviron ms contains 626 folios, but only the first 409 are original.   Interestingly, after the division of this manuscript into two halves, in 1576 someone added paper quires to the back of the Iviron manuscript and copied the missing section there, probably from the Constantinople ms itself.  Again author names appear in the margin in red ink in the original portion of the Iviron ms.  But a distinguishing feature of this manuscript is that someone has added some 57 extra extracts under the lemma “of Jerusalem” which Sickenberger says come from a commentary by Hesychius of Jerusalem.  The manuscript has been extensively corrected, apparently by the copyist.

B. Manuscripts of the first half of the catena

Parisinus graecus 208, paper, 14th century, 406 folios, 30 x 21.5 cms, which once belonged to Cardinal Mazarin, and also has the interpolations and alterations of the Iviron ms.  However there are some differences from the Coislin ms., suggesting that it is a cousin of the Coislin ms, rather than an ancestor or descendant.  The ms. is missing the start of the catena, and only contains the first part of it anyway.  Author names are in the margin.

C. Manuscripts of the second half of the catena

Athos, Vatopedi 457, parchment, 13th century, 585 folios, 33.5 x 24.5 cms, each of 31 lines.

D. Manuscripts of book 1 only

1) Vatican gr. 1642, parchment, 12th century, 295 folios, 36.5 x 28.5 cms, each page has two columns each of 30 lines.  It is a copy of V.

2) Vindobonensis theol. gr. 71 (=L), 12-13th century, in Vienna, 424 folios, 30 x 19.5 cms, only contains book 1 of the catena.  It does contain some lacunae, notably the first 9 folios.  It is the work of two copyists, the second and more careful copyist beginning work at fol. 80.  The first indicates the names of the authors in the margin; the second in the margin or in the body of the text.  Initials are written in red ink.  The manuscript was bought in Constantinople by Augerius of Busbecke, as a note on fol. 1 and f. 242v indicates, and is of oriental origin.  It is in general very clear and readable, except for the first word or two of the first line of each page, where water seems to be responsible.

E. Manuscripts of book 2 only

1) Angelicus gr. 100, from the Bibliotheca Angelica in Rome, parchment, 12th century, 32.5 x 22.5 cms, 343 folios.  The beginning and ending are missing.

2) Florence, Mediceo-Laurenziana, Conventi Soppressi 176, parchment, 12-13th century, 314 folios, 33.5 x 24 cms.  The manuscript is mentioned by Montfaucon in his Diarium Italicum (Paris, 1702), p. 362, lines 37-39.

3) Monacensis gr. 473, bombyzine, 14th century, 416 folios, 24.5 x 17 cms.  Once belonged to the town library in Augsburg.

4) Casanat. 715 (formerly G II 9), paper, 16th century, very pretty manuscript.  On folios 3-319 it contains book 2 of the catena of Nicetas.   The incipit and explicit are the same as those in the Florence copy, indicating that this is a copy of it.

Analysis of the tradition

Sickenberger considers that the tradition divides into three families. 

  • V is the representative of the first or Italian family, and descended from it are Vat. gr. 1642 and also Monac. 473 (14th c.) 
  • The Vienna ms., L, is the main and only complete representative of the second or Byzantine family, although Ang. 100 (12-13th c.), Florence Laurentianus conventi soppressi 176 (12-13th c.) and Athos Vatopedi 457 (13th c.) are cousins to it, rather than children.  Casan. 715 (16th c.) is a copy of the Florence ms.
  • Finally there is the “interpolated” family, where the Iviron ms. I plus the Metochion ms. is the best representative, from which C and Paris gr. 208 (14th c.) are descended, and of course the second part of I (fol. 410-626) copied from the Metochion ms.

Devreesse divided the mss. differently, however, but with much the same results.

There are also secondary witnesses to the catena, because it was inevitable that so large a work would attract abridgement.

The first of these abridgements is the catena published by Corderius.  This is found in two mss.  The first is the Venice Marcianus gr. 494 (13th century), which is very faulty.  The authorship of extracts is often mistaken in this.  The second is the Monacensis gr. 33 (16th century), which seems to be a copy of the former.  Balthazar Cordier made a Latin translation of this catena, using a copy of the Venice ms., which he published at Anvers in 1628. 

In the 14th century, Macarius Chrysocephalus, metropolitan of Philadelphia, composed a catena on Luke, in which he made use of copious extracts from the earlier work of Nicetas.  A manuscript may be found in Oxford, in the Bodleian, Barrocianus 156 (written in 1344).

Guignard also mentions that an unpublished Latin translation exists of the whole catena of Nicetas, made from the Vatican manuscripts, and today at the Biblioteca Nazionale centrale (Rome), mss. 1742 and 1743, which was made at Sant’Andrea della Valle.  I must confess that I wish I owned a copy of this!

Let me end with a copy of Sickenberger’s stemma:

Stemma of the manuscripts of the catena on Luke of Nicetas
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