Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
A correspondant kindly drew my attention to an online resource for Islamic manuscripts. The address is here:
The site includes all five volumes of Graf’s GCAL. It may be 60 years old but it is still the only handbook of Christian Arabic literature.
The site also has a vast array of manuscript-related catalogues and resources.
Theodoret’s Commentary on Romans, part 1 and part 2, from the 1839-40 Christian Remembrancer (vols. 21 and 22) is now online.
The translation appeared in installments throughout those two volumes, and the page numbers reset when the new volume came out. So I have divided it into two web pages.
Many of the notes are by “E.B.”, whom I presume to be E.B. Pusey. The author of the translation is unknown to me.
The language is fake-Jacobean, as so often in Oxford Movement translations. I had no heart to translate it into modern English. I hope it is useful even so.
Regular readers will know that defects in Finereader 11 meant that I had to re-proof this text something like four or five times. I am, quite honestly, glad to have got rid of the thing. It has hung on my hands for the best part of two years.
We have English translations of a great deal of Patristic literature. One of the most conspicuous absences, however, has been the five books that Eusebius of Caesarea wrote against Marcellus of Ancyra after the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. These are the Contra Marcellum and the Ecclesiastical Theology.
Today I heard from Dr Kelley E. Spoerl of Saint Anselm College, who writes:
I am happy to report that my collaborator, Dr. Markus Vinzent of King’s College, London, and I have signed a contract to have the translation published with the Fathers of the Church series from Catholic University of America Press sometime in 2015 or 2016. The manuscript is now with two expert scholars for review and we expect to make the final revisions and submit before the end of 2014.
Already I have heard from another correspondent, interested in seeing the manuscript. But of course the publishers will try to prevent any circulation of that, and quite understandably.
It’s good news. Admittedly the number of people who will be able to access the translation is not nearly what it would be; but at least the thing now exists. My original correspondence with Dr Spoerl was in 2008 (!) so it has been a long time coming. Very welcome all the same.
I ought to highlight that a small part of the Ecclesiastical Theology (III 4-6) is available in English in the dissertation of John Mackett, Eusebius of Caesarea’s Theology of the Holy Spirit. Milwaukee, WI : Marquette University, 1990, p.225-244. This I have seen, and it is mind-boggling – pure theology!
In addition an Italian translation exists: Franzo Migliore, Eusebio di Cesarea: teologia ecclesiastica, Città Nuova, 1998. Google books preview here.
UPDATE (2020): The complete translation of these two works by Kathy E. Spoerl and Markus Vinzent appeared in 2017: Eusebius of Caesarea: Against Marcellus and On Ecclesiastical Theology, Fathers of the Church 135, Catholic University of America (2017).
A dinner engagement took me to St Albans this evening. The road-widening on the M25 caused me to go early; and a look at my own Mithras site revealed that the Verulamium Museum there had some Mithraic items. I took my mobile phone, paid for parking, then admission, and wandered in.
The museum didn’t place any obstacles in the way of photography, other than very low light levels, which troubled my eyes rather more than my digital camera.
What I was hoping to find was a vase, listed by Vermaseren as CIMRM 828, but with no photograph. And, to my delight, there it was! But … with a problem.
The vase was really just fragments. But it had been restored, quite properly. Unfortunately the portion that showed Mithras was impossible to see clearly!
The vase looks like this:
This shows Mercury (with the winged feet) and the bow of Hercules to the left. Mithras is to the right and round the corner:
There were definite stars on his robe, just visible to the naked eye.
I’ve written to the director of archaeology, asking whether a photo might be obtained of the Mithras bit. It will be interesting to see what the answer is.
But of course the same problem could occur in a hundred museums. How do we get the items out of the cases and where we can photograph them? Not that we want to handle these things … but unphotographed means unrecorded means unusable by scholars.
It’s an interesting problem.
The 6th century Chalcedonian theologian, Leontius of Byzantium, is most likely the author of a compilation of texts by the 4th century heretic, Apollinarius of Laodicea, entitled “Against the frauds of the Apollinarists”. What was happening was that Monophysite polemicists were using these texts for anti-Chalcedon arguments. The texts themselves were circulating under the names of respectable authors such as Pope Julius I or Gregory Nazianzen. Leontius tracked down the original comments by Apollinarius and his disciples, and compiled a set of them, so that their ideas could be recognised.
Bryson Sewell has kindly translated it into English for us, from the text printed by Angelo Mai and reprinted in the Patrologia Graeca.
I have uploaded the translation to the Additional Fathers site here. In addition I have uploaded a PDF of the translation (plus the word .doc file) to Archive.org here.
This translation is public domain. Do whatever you like with it, personal, educational or commercial.
If you would like to help me commission further translations, why not use the donate button on the right, or purchase a copy of my CD from here.
For my sins, which evidently must be worse than I had realised, I need to master the contents of an entire book in German. The book in question is Bianca-Jeanette Schröder’s Titel und Text, with the subtitle: Zur Entwicklung lateinischer Gedichtüberschriften. Mit Untersuchungen zu lateinischen Buchtiteln, Inhaltsverzeichnissen und anderen Gliederungsmitteln. It was published by De Gruyter in 1999, and is available for purchase at an eye-watering 150 euros, around $220. It contains around 360 pages, and 8 plates.
My German is very poor, just like everyone else’s. What on earth does one do?
Here’s what I am doing. If anyone else has suggestions, I am very willing to hear them.
Well, the first thing I did was borrow the dratted thing from the library. What else could one do? Nobody on earth could afford to buy a copy.
The next thing I did was to run it through my scanner, and OCR it in Finereader. Being a modern type-face it OCR’s quite well. This gives me each page in the Finereader editor.
I now intend to create notes on the text in a Word document. This will form a permanent record of what I find in this book.
This morning I have taken the table of contents, and pasted it into the Word document. I have then pasted it into Google Translate, and, line by line, converted that table of contents in Word into English. This gives me some idea of the structure of the book, down to a few pages.
The book is actually in three parts, each with a conclusion. It looks to me as if translating the conclusions to each part, again with the assistance of Google Translate, might be the next step. They seem fairly short; a couple of pages. I can do this.
So far I have translated the conclusion to part 1. It’s actually interesting stuff; but not what I need to know about (on the whole). So I can probably ignore part 1.
Just starting on part 2.
Oh yes, what does that subtitle mean? Well, I come up with this:
On the development of Latin poetry headings. With studies on Latin book titles, tables of contents, and other types of divisions (Gliederungsmitteln).
Should be interesting. I hope.
Someone at the British Library has had an excellent idea. They’ve uploaded a spreadsheet listing all the manuscripts they have online, with the URL. It’s here. They have 856 mss online at the moment; a small proportion of their holdings, but still very useful.
The spreadsheet lists shelfmark, contents, url and the project that did the upload. The last won’t be much use, but browsing down the list of contents is exciting!
It will be very useful to me on my current project too.
I learned today from the Evangelical textual criticism blog that the Bibliotheque Nationale Francais have been putting manuscripts online, at their Gallica.bnf.fr portal. Locating these is not straightforward; but if you do an advanced search, leave blank the title etc, and select manuscripts, Greek, you get back a list. A good number are biblical mss., but most are not. Blessedly you can download a PDF of the whole thing in each case.
I thought that a few examples might be useful. The first item is the shelfmark
I’m about half way through and have to rush off. A few more.
But a great number have no description, although I find that if you look inside, a slip glued onto the guard-folios at the front often tells you what the contents are.
This is marvellous, and I haven’t really digested what is here. There’s 146 Greek but only 15 Latin mss.
I’m looking through the Greek mss. of the French National Library online, and compiling a post with a list. Dull work.
But imagine my excitement when I find that Paris gr. 451 is online. This is the manuscript that preserves for us a bunch of early Christian apologetic works! It was copied for Archbishop Arethas of Caesarea in the 10th c., and it all we have for most of the works in it.
Contents: 1. Clement of Alexandria, Protrepicus; 2. Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus; 3. Justini epistulam ad Zenam; 4. Justin, Cohortatio ad gentiles; 5. Eusebius, P.E. bks 1-5; 6. Athenagoras, Apology for the Christians; 7. Athenagoras on the Resurrection; 8. Eusebius, Against Hierocles.
Get it here! But wait just a bit, until my download has finished. Please?
Yes, you can download a PDF of it.
Quite accidentally I find that colour photographs of the pages of Didymus the Blind’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes are online here. I can only say “wow!”
This work was lost until 1941. In that year, the threat of Rommel’s Afrika Corps caused the British Government to order works carried out at the Tura quarries near Cairo, to store ammunition. The quarries themselves were used in ancient times. At some point native workmen discovered a pile of leaves of papyrus hidden under apparently random chunks of stone. They promptly spirited them away and sold them for a song to the antiquities dealers. But word got out, and most of the find was recovered. The main portion of it was biblical commentaries by Didymus the Blind and Origen.
Now wouldn’t it be nice if an English translation of this work was also online?