Tag: Manuscripts

More British Library mss.

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The British Library continue their digitisation of their manscripts, which is very welcome.  They’ve moved on to the Royal collection, although the focus seems to have drifted back to digitising “pretty books” and medievalia, rather than the material that classics and patristics scholars will want.

There is a Tertullian in that collection, which ought to be online.  But I have given up making suggestions and requests, since it never seems to have any effect.

In the current upload only one volume is of interest:

  • Royal 6 C. i   — Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, England (St Augustine’s, Canterbury), 4th quarter of the 11th century.
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Papyri of St Augustine in the Green collection?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via Tommy Wasserman at Evangelical Textual Criticism I learn of some rather exciting news!

The Baptist Standard reports (2012-07-10) from the same summer institute citing Jeff Fish (editor of the new Brill series) who said:

Scholars also mentored students editing some of the earliest fragments of the New Testament, with some dating to the second century, Fish said. Other discoveries are fragments of copies of some of St. Augustine’s commentaries on John’s Gospel and the Psalms, . . .

There is a little more on the session here, although no more about Augustine.

Also, it looks as if New Testament material will not relegate other material to the sidelines: Dr W. reckons that “the first volume will not contain the NT MSS”.  Information from this interview with Jerry Pattengale in Indiana Wesleyan University (2012-08-02):

Comprising of one to two new volumes per year, the new series will publish approximately 20 papyri with a thorough description, commentary with images, and web-based support for further resources.

The first forthcoming volume in the series, planned to be released in early 2013, is dedicated to an early 3c BCE papyrus containing an extensive, undocumented work by Aristotle on reason, and is currently being analyzed by a research group at Oxford University.

Of course the biblical material is no doubt of very great importance; but classical and patristic material is pretty interesting too!

Well done, Steven Green, for getting hold of all this stuff, and making it available!

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A new work by Aristotle in the Green collection?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I  learned of the Green Collection, a large private collection of manuscripts and papyri.  It is owned by the Green family of Oklahoma, who are (a) billionaires and (b) Christians.  In consequence they have been collecting material of wide interest. 

Brill have announced a new series of publications for the papyri:

The new series fits well among Brill’s strong portfolio of Classical Studies and Biblical and Religious Studies publications, as well as its extensive list of digitized primary source manuscript collections. Comprising of one to two new volumes per year, the new series will publish approximately 20 papyri with a thorough description, commentary with images, and web-based support for further resources.

The first forthcoming volume in the series, planned to be released in early 2013, is dedicated to an early 3c BCE papyrus containing an extensive, undocumented work by Aristotle on reason, and is currently being analyzed by a research group at Oxford University.

The Green Collection contains over 50,000 items, and now holds nearly 15,000 papyri acquired from private collections in Europe, and continues to grow. The collection is approximately 70% Greek, 15% Coptic and 15% late Egyptian. The collection is currently unpublished and contains items of extraordinary importance, including some of the earliest Greek literary texts known, dating to the early 3c BCE. A major building near Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. was purchased in July 2012 to house an international museum for these items.

They are also working with scholars at Tyndale House in Cambridge:

The Green Collection has announced that the Codex Climaci Rescriptus – containing the earliest-known texts of Scripture in something close to Jesus’ household language – will return to the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the collection’s international research arm, the Green Scholars Initiative.

Top manuscript scholars from Cambridge’s Tyndale House will conduct intensive, high-tech research on the codex’s 137 reused vellum leaves, which feature overlapping layers of text. Recent technological breakthroughs developed by Green Scholars at the University of Oxford allow once unreadable, underlying text from the codex to be “lifted” to the surface for enhanced study through a process known as “multi-spectral imaging.”

In selecting Cambridge as the official research home of the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, Green Scholars Initiative Director Dr. Jerry Pattengale said, “Tyndale House is a perfect fit for this project given both its excellent scholars and its reputation in biblical studies. We are pleased with the strength of their ancient languages, from Aramaic, Syriac and Hebrew to Greek and Coptic – and, just as important, their passionate interest in biblical studies.”

They have launched the Green Scholars Initiative:

The Green Scholars Initiative is an international research project involving dozens of institutions under the auspices of The Green Collection, the world’s newest and largest private collection of rare biblical texts and artifacts.

Through thousands of cuneiform texts and papyri, Dead Sea Scrolls and Coptic texts to Gutenberg, Wycliff, Tyndale, Thomas à Kempis, Erasmus, King James and a litany of Reformation and post-Reformation original texts, the Green Scholars Initiative brings established and young scholars together to pioneer groundbreaking biblical discoveries

There will be a new museum in Washington:

A sampling of the Bible museum’s offerings — from the collection of more than 40,000 artifacts — have been displayed in the Passages Exhibit at the Vatican and in Oklahoma City and Atlanta and will soon appear in Charlotte, N.C.

All this is very encouraging for papyrus and manuscript studies: a family with the resources to collect and publish materials, and the desire to do so.  And for once it is being done from a Christian perspective too.  Well done!

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The cost of copying books by hand

Posted on by Roger Pearse

At the end of Ms. Vall. 2297, there is an interesting note by the owner, a 15th century chap named Sozomenus, about whom I know nothing except that he owned manuscripts:

Melius est emere libros iam scriptos quam scribi facere: nam pro membranis exposui grossos tredecim, scriptori dedi libros duodecim, et cartorario grossos quatuor.  Summa ergo in totum libras  sexdecim solidos tredecim denarios vi. Die primo mensis Martii MCCCCXXV.[1]

It is better to buy books already written than to have them written: now for parchments I am out 13 grossos, I gave 12 to the scribe of the boooks, and 4 grossos to the binder.  In total therefor in all books 16 solidi, 13 denarii and vi.  1st March, 1425.

The “grosso”, or “denaro grosso” — “heavy penny” — was an Italian silver coin, heavier than a silver penny.  The name is related to the medieval “groat”, I believe.  It cost the owner 29 of these to have these books copied.

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  1. [1]Albert C. Clark, Sabbadini’s Finds of Greek and Latin MSS, The Classical Review 20 (1906), p.229, referencing the Valliere catalogue (cur. de Bure, 1783) vol. ii. p.26.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/694935↩

More manuscripts online at the British Library

Posted on by Roger Pearse

At the British Library manuscripts blog, there is news.

Final Harley Science Manuscripts Published

We are delighted to announce that the remaining manuscripts in our Harley Science Project have now been published to the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts site. All 150 manuscripts in this project have been digitised and recatalogued thanks to the generosity of William and Judith Bollinger. We hope that this resource, part of our ongoing campaign to make our collection items more accessible, will promote new research into the books in question.

I hope so too.  It can’t do the slightest harm.  The cataloguing is pretty good too, I have to say.  But … I wish we could get PDF’s of the mss, rather than being at the mercy of slow broadband and a quirky interface.  I suspect it will come, once libraries recognise that it doesn’t harm them in any way.

Access to these texts was always the problem; only a tiny handful of geographically local scholars could do much.  Now … there are NO excuses for lazy scholarship.  Get publishing articles, gentlemen!

In the current tranche, the following items will be of interest to us.

  • Harley 2686  Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae (France, 9th century)
  • Harley 3748  Galen, Opera (France or Italy, 14th-15th century)
  • Harley 3892  Miscellaneous texts on rhetoric, grammar, geometry and divination (Italy, 1400-1454) — this actually also contains parts of Horace, Ars Poetica and Letters.
  • Harley 3915  Collection of chemical, alchemical and medical recipes, and texts on the techniques and technology of various arts (Germany, 1200-1444) — Includes an extract from Vitruvius, and an autograph note by Nicholas of Cusa, indicating that this book once belonged to him (and so ought to be in Berkastel-Kues with the rest of his books).
  • Harley 3969  Works on history, natural history and rhetoric (England, 14th century) — Actually includes extracts from: Cassiodorus, De orthographia, Censorinus de natali die, Apuleius, Dares Phrygius, Pliny the Elder, and Jerome’s Letter to Helvidius.
  • Harley 4241  Aristotle, Metaphysica (Germany, c. 1450-1464) — Another of St. Nicolas of Cusa’s books.

There are a number of other Latin translations, of Euclid and Aristotle.

Good to have these.

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Manuscripts of Quintus Curtius Rufus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Penguin translation of the History of Alexander the Great by Q. Curtius Rufus tells me that there are 123 manuscripts of this work.[1]  A list is apparently given by Dosson in his Etude sur Quinte Curce, 1887, p.315-356 (online here).

The work was originally in 10 books, but books 1 and 2 are lost.  There are also large lacunae at the end of book 5 / start of book 6, and in the middle of book 10.  All the extant mss. are of French origin.  The extant manuscripts, which date from the 9th century onwards, divide into two classes, one of which exhibits signs of scholarly tampering.  There is also a mass of late mss, virtually unexamined.

Interestingly the work of Quintus Curtius Rufus is not referenced by other extant writers until the 9th century, although passages which suggest the author had read Curtius Rufus — or perhaps his source — can be found in Seneca, Lucan, and Quintilian.[2]

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  1. [1]p.1.↩
  2. [2]Dosson, p.357.↩

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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Automated microfilm readers to convert microfilms to digital form?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In Oracle Magazine this month, there is an interesting article about a genealogical firm who are systematically converting microfilmed records into digital format.

At one archival site, FamilySearch has been storing images of historic documents on microfilm since the 1930s and has amassed 3.5 million rolls of film containing 4 billion records.

“Microfilm is a very stable medium, but it is not very accessible,” says Randy Stokes, group architect for engineering services, storage infrastructure, at FamilySearch. “We knew that if we wanted to make it easier for people to do research and find their ancestors, we would have to put this information into digital form.”

It’s a huge job. Approximately 25 automated scanners are used to scan the microfilm to digital images. Additionally, new photographic images are continually coming in from 185 digital cameras in the field. These operations yield terabytes of new image data each day. The original lossless images are saved as JPEG 2000 images for long-term storage … One copy is written to an in-house preservation system and another to an offsite archival location.

…“Between the scanners and the cameras, we amass 10 to 12 terabytes of new image data each day.”

Manuscript images also exist in microfilm in great quantities.  I don’t know which brand of machines are used here — a Google search reveals several types — but clearly it is both practical and effective.

 

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Over 500 Latin Manuscripts available in PDF at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Pyle site aims to be a portal for manuscripts.  And it links to some very interesting stuff. 

Among this is a link to Greek manuscripts at the BNF in Paris.  These are mainly late; but there are gospel manuscripts, catena manuscripts, and commentaries on the Iliad and Odyssey.

But here is the biggie: you can download the whole manuscript!  Yes!!!  That’s just what we want.

But I wondered what would happen if I adjusted their link to look for Latin manuscripts?  And … there are 1116 matches!  Wow!

You have to click on “Informations detailees” to see what the ms. contains.  There are loads of bibles, of course, and medieval texts.  But what we see is a real cornucopia of what the BNF contains!  Here are some selections (I’d love to link, but I really haven’t the time):

  • Ms. Latin 8953: There’s books 21-40 of Livy.
  • Ms. Latin 6755: A bunch of texts: 1.° Aristotelis liber de secretis secretorum : interprete Philippo , Clerico Tripolitano. — 2.° Ambrosii Autperti tractatus de conflictu vitiorum et virtutum. — 3.° Flores è Scriptoribus cùm sacris tum profanis collecti. — 4.° Anonymi opusculum de musica. — 5.° Descriptio sanctorum locorum circa Jerusalem. — 6.° Descriptio urbis Antiochiae. — 7.° Urbium et majorum villarum quas Carolus acquisivit in Hispania et Galecia catalogus. — 8.° Sancti Bernardi meditationes. — 9.° Anonymus de constructione et excidio templi Hierosolymitani, et de passione Christi. — 10.° Methodii , Patarensis Episcopi, oratio de Antichristo et de consummatione saeculi. — 11.° Anonymi dialogus de vitae felicitate.  Yes, that really does contain a text by Methodius!
  • Ms. Latin 11627: Jerome’s commentary on Isaiah.
  • Ms. Latin 7900: Terence
  • Cicero
  • Sallust
  • Eusebius, HE, in Rufinus translation.
  • Plutarch, Lives.
  • Herodotus, translated by Lorenzo Valla.
  • A 9th century ms. of Isidore of Seville.
  • Oh yes!  A manuscript of the letters of Pliny the Younger! (I’ve been blogging about these this week).  This is ms. Latin 8557, dated 1470-1471.
  • Lactantius, Divine Institutes.
  • Ms. Latin 9661, the Notitia Dignitatum!
  • Ms. Latin 8658A, Seneca: Moral Letters!  In a 9th century ms., no less!
  • Josephus, Jewish War.  Another has Antiquities.
  • Catullus.
  • Statius.
  • Lucan’s Pharsalia.
  • Quintus Curtius Rufus.
  • Ps.Hegesippus, de bello Judaico. (13th c., ms. 5064)
  • Tibullus, and Propertius, and Petronius, all in one volume.
  • Suetonius, ms. 5802, 13th c.
  • The Augustan History, dated 1356.
  • Cyprian. Ms.1657, 1175-1200, including chapter titles for letters.
  • Justinus’ epitome of Pompeius Trogus, ms. 4950, ca. 800-850 AD!
  • Caesar, De bello gallico.
  • Quintilian
  • Virgil
  • Commentary on Tironian notation, dated 9th c.  Ms. Latin 8779.

After a while, you just start flicking past the treasures, so rich is the bounty on offer!  I did download a couple; but who needs to download much, when you can find it here anytime, accompanied by a good catalogue entry?  If you need a PDF, say to flick through quickly, just grab it.

After about 500 mss, suddenly we find ourselves in modern Latin “manuscripts”.  These, of course, are of no interest to us, valuable as they doubtless are to others.

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Digitising the manuscripts of Lorsch

Posted on by Roger Pearse

After my last post, I started looking for evidence of the work of Heidelberg university in digitising Vatican manuscripts.  To my astonishment, I found a website for the now vanished library of the abbey of Lorsch!  It seems that a team from Heidelberg have been attempting to recreate this Dark Ages library, full of very interesting manuscripts, and destroyed and scattered during the Thirty Years War.  Here they discuss their work.

133 manuscripts, which once formed part of the Carolingian monastic library Lorsch, are integrated nowadays into the valuable and large collection of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. In 1622/23 the manuscripts were brought to Rome as part of Heidelberg’s Bibliotheca Palatina. For its digitization project “Bibliotheca Laureshamensis – digital” Heidelberg University Library was permitted to digitize the Lorsch manuscripts on the premises of the Vatican Library in Rome. Thus, in November 2010 a digitization centre was set up in Rome in cooperation with the Vatican Library for the digitization of the manuscripts. The digitization of the entire Lorsch manuscripts in Rome was completed within eight months by a team of six.

The list of all the manuscripts once part of Lorsch is here. 

The Vatican library manuscripts online are listed here.  Many are biblical manuscripts, most are 9th century.  There are gems for us, tho: Arnobius the Younger, Hilary of Poitiers, Ps.Hegesippus, Ambrosiaster, Jerome, Augustine, Marius Mercator, Paulinus of Nola, Orosius, Cassiodorus, Bede, Isidore, Jordanes … the list goes on.  Just look for yourself at the list!

I can’t resist noting Pal. lat. 822, a copy of Rufinus’ translation of Eusebius’ Church History.  Or the presence of Macrobius and the Historia Augusta in Pal. lat. 886, foll. 125-189.  Or two works by Sallust, the conspiracy of Cataline, and the Jugurthine War, in Pal. lat. 887 and Pal. lat. 889.  Cicero, Seneca, Fulgentius Mythographicus, Vergil … yes, and a Servius’ Commentary on Vergil… And whoa!  There’s a 10th century manuscript of Juvenal, Pal. lat. 1701!

Then there are three medieval catalogues of the library at Lorsch, as it was, in Pal. lat. 1877.  These have been published, and are found in G. Becker’s Catalogi Bibliothecarum Antiqui, in doubtless not very reliable form.  But here are the originals!

Finally, fancy a look at Cyprian?  Try Reg. lat. 118.

OK, there’s not a lot there that causes me, this instant, to click on it.  But then only a manuscript of Pliny the Elder would do that, just at the moment!

Why have I never heard of this?

UPDATE: But … oh good grief, what is this??!?!  I tried clicking on one of the mss, and got the following: 

No wonder I have never heard of all this.  Who, one wonders, was so STUPID as to do this?  To do all that work, and then, greedily, HIDE the images!!!

Sometimes I despair, I really do.

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