Category: Information access

Rheinisches Museum 93-147 (1950-2004) now online and free

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s available in PDF form from here, courtesy of the German Research Foundation.  This journal contains quite a bit of patristic-related material.  This is because the editor, Bernd Manuwald, applied to that foundation for a grant to do it.  Well done Dr Manuwald!

I understand that he is also applying for money to digitise the remaining issues.  Frankly he looks like a hero to me.

The last three years are not available online.  This protects the subscription income from universities, where the very latest articles are needed.  But it is a mark of Bernd Manuwald’s vision that he has limited the offline material to just that range. 

None of us ordinary mortals will care that the last three years are not freely available.  It is rarely a matter of concern to the interested amateur to keep up with the very latest papers.  But the audience for a century of material is wide.

Later: Adrian Murdoch at the ever-excellent Bread and Circuses blog has picked up the story, and tells us that ZPE is also available freely online, although I can’t actually find it on that site.  Come on gents at the ZPE: if you’ve done the work, make it obvious where it is!

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Agapius translation – great minds think alike

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Arabic history of Agapius was published with a  very simple French translation in the Patrologia Orientalis.  Since there is no English translation of this interesting work, I’ve been working on making one from the French.  The PO version was made by a Russian, so is not complex French and machine translators can make quite a good attempt at it.

I heard today from another online chap, who has been doing the same!  He’s suggesting we look at collaboration, or at least avoiding doing the same job twice.  That would be sensible, I think.

I never imagined that there was any risk of someone else doing this.  I felt a bit shifty about it; translating a translation is a bit rubbish.  But after a century it is clear that no-one was going to make an English translation of any of the five important Arabic Christian histories.  Maybe my efforts might provoke one!

In a way, we’re looking at a positive spiral here.  An amateur does a rubbishy translation of part of it from French, which provokes another amateur to do a better one, which provokes someone who knows Arabic to improve the situation again, which leads a professional to do an academic version.  That’s what is happening with Eusebius Chronicle (more or less!), and everyone benefits as momentum takes hold.

Of course there is a negative spiral possible, as Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie found out almost a century ago.  He produced some bad translations of Proclus, often from the French.  No-one took any notice.  The only person to take any notice was a now-forgotten academic, who published a review slagging them off as worthless.  So Guthrie was discouraged, no-one else was motivated to do better, and to this day the works he attempted have never received a proper translation.

Let’s hope that everyone who sees efforts like mine will think “I can do better” — and do better; rather than spend time debunking them.  Per ardua ad astra.

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Bibliographies of classical Armenian

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There comes a time in the life of every man interested in patristics when he needs to know about classical Armenian literature.  Hoc est hora.  There must be fragments of Eusebius in Armenian catenas, I reason.  But where to look?

The indefatigable Robert W. Thomson gave us a Bibliography of classical Armenian literature to 1500, published by Brepols in 1995 and available for an eye-watering sum.  I think that I will try and do an ILL for that!

But while surfing for it, in abebooks.co.uk I came across something strange, something otherwise unknown to Google.  It’s a series called “The Armenian Classical Authors”, published by the Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia ca. 2005.  There are at least 5 volumes, each running to around $100.  It starts with the 5th century of course.  Contents are in Armenian, which is why they don’t show up in an English-language book search.

Book Description: Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia, 2005. Hardcover. Book Condition: New. The Armenian Classical Authors Volume IV, 7th Century. Yegavian, Zaven (Director).

Book Description: The Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia, Antelias (Lebanon), 2005. Hard Cover. Book Condition: New. First Edition. xiii, 791 pp., Armenian text, double columns per page, hard back. A series of studies covering large number of Armenian authors. The idea of this work was pursued by his Holiness Aram I Catholicos. In the occasion of the 1600 anniversary of the Armenian Alphabet Genesis, invented by Mesrob Mashdots, and in celebration of the Armenian Golden literary age of the fifth century. This work contain a bibliography of famous Armenian authors of the fifth century, together with a study and analysis of the work of each author. Due to weight and size of the book, shipping to outside of the USA is $39.00. Inside USA is $10.00. Size: 8 1/2″ x 11″

How fascinating!  How wonderful that such a book should exist.  I’ve even managed to find an online bookseller in Lebanon who stocks it, Kutub Ltd (and even my Syriac is enough to recognise the triliteral root KTB = book).  Nice to see the Lebanese abandoning their pointless civil wars long enough to make money.  But… any chance of it in English?

Later: I’ve been asking in LT-ANTIQ, and the excellent Dominique Gonnet has told me that the Clavis Patrum Graecorum supplements cover versions of Greek texts in Syriac, Armenian, etc.  I must hie me to a library and look!

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Theoi texts offline

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Theoi Classical Texts Library seems to be offline.  This contained English translations of quite a few texts.  I do hope that it is only a temporary glitch.  But the texts themselves are still online here.

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7,300+ visitors to Tertullian.org last month

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I was interested to discover from this site that apparently more than 7,300 unique individuals used my site last month.  For a site dedicated to a subject as abtruse as the Fathers, that’s not bad going.  Perhaps we underestimate interest in early Christian history?

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Eusebius in Armenian

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We all know that many interesting works are preserved in Classical Armenian translation.  Eusebius’ Church History exists in an Armenian version; book 1 of his Chronicle is only preserved in Armenian.  But what else exists?

I’ve often mentioned that I have translators at work on Eusebius’ Gospel differences and their solutions (Quaestiones ad Stephanum, ad Marinum).  Today I received a translation of a chunk of this work from a Coptic catena, much to my delight.

But what about Armenian?  What exists?  What catenae exist?  What catalogues of unpublished manuscripts?  Is there any possibility that this work Eusebius exists whole somewhere?  Or new fragments in a catena?

I realise that I have no idea.  If anyone can point me in the direction of finding out, I would be most grateful!

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G.W.H.Lampe’s “Patristic Lexicon” – could we get it electronically?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

As we get XML versions of Liddell and Scott, etc, we inevitably start to wonder about other standard reference tools, such as Lampe.  A PDF of the raw page images doesn’t really do it, although that is better than carrying a book around.

Of course those as rich and privileged as myself have no problem here.  We just buy a dozen printed copies and place one in each of our homes, plus one in the back of the Rolls. Also, we can get our butler to carry it for us.  But this still leaves rather a lot of other people with a problem.  And… if we had it in electronic form, it would be possible to do interesting things with it.

I found this blog post from somewhere unpronounceable which asked the same question.  And I ask: how do we go about getting an XML version of a copyright text?  One that we can all use in our computer programs?

The book was published in 1961, comprises 1600+ pages, and is published by Oxford University Press who presumably own it.

Could Perseus negotiate some deal?  Could Logos?  How would one do this?

 

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Digitization of the Plutei collection in Florence

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve had an email from the Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana in Florence telling me that they are actively exploring digitising the Plutei collection. This includes massive numbers of the oldest manuscripts of any number of the classics, including both Tacitus manuscripts. They think it will take around 30 months, and they intend to put the results online.

Remarkably, they’re also looking at ways for people to contribute to the online material and so enhance the content.  This is very far-seeing of them, and will be most interesting to see.

All early days, but very, very interesting.

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Robert Bedrosian does Eusebius’ Chronicle into English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just had a note from the excellent Robert Bedrosian.  It seems that he has translated Eusebius of Caesarea’s Chronicle book 1 directly from the Armenian into English!  It’s here.  Andrew Smith of Attalus.org translated it from Petermann’s Latin into English, but this is the first translation from the original langauge.  And… he’s made it public domain, so anyone can use it.

Robert has also scanned most of the Budge translation into English of Bar-Hebraeus Chronicon Syriacum (the secular history).

Robert’s site is much less well known than it deserves to be.  It’s impossible to get people to translate Classical Armenian into English, even for money (I’ve tried!).  Yet here is a great selection of primary Armenian sources, all free, all online, all of the highest historical interest.

More later when I have a chance to actually look at this!

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Does the manuscript of Tacitus say ‘Christian’ or ‘Chrestian’?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday I wrote a post criticising the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence in some pretty direct terms.  I’ve deleted it; because it seems that I got hold of the wrong end of the stick.

We all know the reference to the Christians in Tacitus, Annals, book 15, chapter 44.  A discussion arose in an online forum as to whether this said ‘Christians’ or ‘Chrestians’ in the single manuscript.  The only photographs available, from an elderly facsimile, were monochrome and it was impossible to tell.  It certainly said ‘Christians’; but there was a gap after the ‘i’.

A friend saw that the only thing to be done was to get a new photograph of the page.  This he did, and let me look at it, which was kind.  But as it was monochrome also, I was under the impression that the BML had sold him a monochrome photograph.  That would be a disgraceful thing for a library to do, in 2008, when every librarian has a mobile phone with a colour digital camera built in, and I said so.

But later I learned that they had actually sold him an ultra-violet image, which was naturally monochrome!  That left me feeling quite sheepish, and I deleted the post.

The image revealed the erased ‘e’ in ‘Christians’, neatly filling the gap in the manuscript.  They charged him three or four euros for it, which is a very reasonable price, and the image was of the whole opening, not just a single page.  In fact the photograph is rather splendid, nicely displaying the two column mis-en-page.  Of course a colour image under normal light would be nice too!

The only thing that is unsatisfactory is that I cannot show the image to you.  For it is not online, and copyright in the EU probably covers it.  The image really should be on the BML website.  Here is an excerpt from the photo, although enlarged a little too much.

 Tacitus, Annals: the word 'Christians' or 'Chrestians'
Tacitus, Annals: the word 'Christians' or 'Chrestians'

But well done the BML for selling a good, useful image, very cheaply. 

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