Tag: Manuscripts

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.

Share

Vatican (and Bodleian?) Greek manuscripts to go online?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Mike Aquilina writes to tell me about a new manuscript digitisation initiative.  The BBC has an article on the story:

Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries and the Vatican’s Biblioteca Apostolica plan to digitise 1.5 million ancient texts to make them available online.

The two libraries announced the four-year project after receiving a £2m award from the Polonsky Foundation.

Dr Leonard Polonsky said his aim was to ensure researchers and the public have free access to historic and rare texts.

Greek manuscripts, 15th Century printed books and Hebrew early printed books and manuscripts will be digitised.  …

Two thirds of the material will come from the Vatican Library and the rest from the Bodleian.

Well done, Dr Polonsky!!

The Catholic News Service adds:

The Bodleian-Vatican Library digitized collections will be in three subject areas: Greek manuscripts, incunabula and Hebrew manuscripts.

According to the Bodleian, the subject areas were chosen because both libraries have strong collections in those areas and because of the collections’ importance to scholars. The project will bring together online “materials that have been dispersed between the two collections over the centuries,” the Bodleian press release said.

Some 800 Vatican incunabula will be digitised, they say.

The Vatican Radio site indicates (in French only!) that 1.5 million pages from manuscripts and incunables will be digitised.  Scanning of manuscripts is already underway.  The Vatican has 80,000 manuscripts and 8,900 incunables, and has been experimenting with digitisation since 2010.  And the Prefect of the Vatican Library, Mgr Pasini, adds:

«La quantité des manuscrits numérisés grandit grâce aussi au travail du Laboratoire de reproduction et aussi aux projets visés, en collaboration avec les institutions culturelles : ainsi est en cours de réalisation la numérisation des manuscrits Palatins latins, en collaboration avec l’Université de Heidelbert. »

“The quantity of digitised manuscripts is increasing thanks also to the work of the Laboratory of reproduction, and also to existing projects, in collaboration with cultural institutions: in this way the digitisation of the ‘Palatine’ Latin manuscripts is in progress, in collaboration with the University of Heidelbert.“

I presume that should read “Heidelberg”, capital of the Rheinland Palatinate. The “Palatine” collection came from there to the Vatican, as part of the settlement of the Thirty Years War.  Now that by itself is quite exciting news, for the Codici Latini Palatini are some of the most important Vatican Latin manuscripts. 

There are some Hebrew texts of no special interest here.  But there is more:

En ce qui concerne les manuscrits grecs, seront enfin numérisés d’importants témoins des œuvres d’Homère, de Sophocle, de Platon, d’Hippocrate, ainsi que des codex du Nouveau Testament et des Pères de l’Eglise, dont un grand nombre sont richement décorés de miniatures byzantines.

As for the Greek manuscripts, finally some important witnesses will be digitised of the works of Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Hippocrates, as well as some codices of the New Testament and the Fathers of the Church, of which a great number are richly decorated with Byzantine miniatures.

Hum.  Well, “pretty-pretty” books are of no real interest other than to a tiny number of art historians, but at least we see recognition of “important witnesses” to the text of various authors.  And it will include patristic authors.

The story appears elsewhere, but there seem to be no additional details.

It’s very good news!  And all thanks to Dr Leonard Polonsky, and his Polonsky Foundation.  Apparently the man has form, working with the Bodleian to digitise material and paying for the work.  A man after my own heart, this.

It is good to see that Dr. Polonsky makes clear his motivation: to make stuff accessible to us all.  If I might suggest something, Dr. P?  Make sure the libraries make the books downloadable as PDF’s, whatever other way they make the stuff accessible.  Given half a chance they will lock the images away.

Share

Would it really be so difficult to determine how chapter divisions are marked in all surviving ancient books?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The question of chapter divisions and headings in ancient literary and technical texts is a long term interest of mine, as anyone who chooses to look may discover by clicking on the tag at the end of this post.  We find, in later medieval texts, that these ancient texts are often divided, not merely into books, but also into chapters, with chapter headings.  It does not seem well known or classified, just how often we find this.  Chapter divisions and titles are a cinderella subject, largely ignored or treating in passing.

In my last post, I looked at what chapter divisions and titles there were in a renaissance manuscript of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History.  The NH is an interesting work to investigate, for this subject, since the author states in the preface that book 1 of the work is a list of capituli.  So we do know that these items existed in the autograph, whereas we generally have no such certainty in other works. 

Capituli, or “subject headings”, are perhaps just a list of topics covered, in the order in which they appear in the text.  There is no necessity to suppose that the text was formally divided into “chapters”, in the manner of a modern work –indeed some of the capituli refer to no more than a handful of lines of text, before the next capitulum appears in the margin, so we might better say “sections” — and we can see that in the Pliny ms. it is not. 

So while the English word “chapter” perhaps derives from the Latin capitulum — or does it?  Do we know this, and if so, how? — the term is perhaps one that is rather different.  Perhaps we need a word study of the appearance of the English word, and how it was originally used, and how it came to mean what it means today.  Is it used to translate capitulum in medieval English texts?  There is clearly a research project here.

Likewise we ought to locate all uses of the term capituli in ancient literature — and likewise the Greek kephalaia — and from this determine its meaning or meanings, and any change that they underwent during the ancient and medieval period.  This might begin with an electronic search, and it really should not take more than a couple of weeks to do.

But finally … we need to look at ancient books themselves, and see just what is in the margins, or gathered at the start of books, or whatever.  Do we have chapter titles marked?  Are they  numbered?  Are there collections of them at the start of the book, in a multi-book history?  Or is it a case that the early mss just have a list of topics at the start of each book, and that these are mirrored in the body of the work, gradually, by subsequent readers and copyists?  Which works have these elements?

It sounds like a large task.  But is it?  A commenter on my last post pointed out that, in some ways, it is a superficial task.  All we have to do is look through the manuscript at a high level.  And that may not be so hard to do.

For the number of actual ancient books is not that great.  The Codices Latini Antiquiores of E. A. Lowe lists all the fragments of ancient Latin books.  The number of codices which are more or else intact is probably not that great.  I don’t know about Greek mss from antiquity, but surely there is a list somewhere?

Nor does it necessarily involve a lot of travel.  The IRHT in France has a huge collection of microfilms of manuscripts.  Admittedly this is not nearly as good as colour images — and whether a link is in red ink or black might well be important here — but a couple of weeks work at a microfilm reader in Orleans might well answer many of these questions, and provide a base of data from which some solid conclusions might be drawn.  It sounds like a solid piece of work for a PhD thesis, for a student who is prepared to work hard.

I feel tempted myself; but of course I am not an academic, and I don’t have the time.  Sadly, I fear, I don’t have the energy any more either!  But the whole question of chapter divisions, titles, etc, is one that simply needs a pioneer to go into it.  It’s not that hard to do; just that no-one has really attacked it. 

I’ve always thought of the task of working out the history of the chapter titles for endless different literary and technical works was one that would require an army of scholars.  Indeed a great manuscript scholar once wrote to me that it would require scholarly collaboration.

But why not simply examine what is in all the surviving ancient codices, up to the 8th century, and publish details of what is to be found therein?

How long would that really take?

Share

Chapter titles in Pliny the Elder

Posted on by Roger Pearse

With the new availability online of images of the British Library ms. Harley MS 2676 (Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis,  Florence, 1465-1467), we can now investigate just how the chapter titles are presented in a manuscript.

Technical note: there seems to be no way to link directly from here to the pages in question.  Ideally I would link the images below direct to the full page, so that readers could scroll around and examine for themselves, but sadly this does not seem to be possible.

In this manuscript, there is first a list of books, with a numeral at the front.  Then there are the chapter titles, gathered by book, but … with no chapter numeral at the front of each title!  Here is a screen grab of folio 2r, where the titles for book 2 (book 1 is a preface) appear, and the numerals do not:

It is unlikely that a humanist copyist would have removed the numerals, so I think we may take it that they were not present in the ancestor copies either.

And how do the titles appear in book 2, in the body of the text?  They appear, naturally, without numerals either, as marginalia.  Here is folio 20v (there seems to be no way to link directly to the page):

But here is the rub: the “titles” are not the same.  In the contents, the first title is “de forma eius” — “concerning its form” — which references the preceding sentence that indicates the book is about the world.  The next title, “de motu”, is the same in both.

Each of these titles has an initial.  But the third title, lower down the page, does not.  There is no paragraph break either: 

 

It is left to the reader to determine where, if anywhere, the break should be.  The paragraph breaks, the initials, do not relate to the chapter titles, then.

But … were the marginal chapter titles even present in earlier manuscripts?  Or were these placed where they are by the humanist copyist?

In book 1, which has no chapter titles, we find what are plainly renaissance glosses, highlighting a mention of Cicero, for instance, written in the column to the side.  Similar notes seem to appear later: on f.22r there is a marginal note “pythagoras”, written as if it was a chapter title.

The answer to this must appear from looking at more, and older, manuscripts.

All the same, we do see that numbering chapter titles in the body of the text was not something that just happened naturally, since these have none.  They seem, indeed, more like “headings”, indicating content, than chapter divisions as we would have them.  And indeed, “capituli” is precisely that … “headings”!

Perhaps we should take the Latin more seriously, and modern habits of book making rather less so.

Share

New BL mss online: technical texts

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I learn from the British Library manuscripts blog that a further bunch of manuscripts from the Harley collection have now been placed online at their site, courtesy of funding by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.  These are described as “science manuscripts”, which of course covers a multitude of things, not all of them interesting to us.  The majority are of medieval texts.  But it includes a number of ancient technical texts.

We’re all familiar with ancient literary texts: Herodotus, Cicero, Livy, Tertullian, St. Augustine, and so forth.  But the technical literature of antiquity is much less well known, and much of it has barely been edited.  Very little exists in English.  This category includes medical handbooks, astrological works, and many others.

Skimming over the BL site, I note these manuscripts of works by ancient technical authors:

  • Harley MS 1585 Illustrated compilation of texts on herbs and making up medicines (Netherlands, 12th century) including various late-antique texts.
  • Harley MS 2650 Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, book 8 (=De astronomia) (France or England, 12th century)
  • Harley MS 2660 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae and De natura rerum (Germany, 1136), plus four letters of Isidore.
  • Harley MS 2676 Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis (Florence, 1465-1467)
  • Harley MS 2766 Iulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis (Italy, 15th century), the astrological compendium.
  • Harley MS 3015 Miscellany including Bede’s De natura rerum (England, 12th century) specifically: — (f. 1v); John Chrysostom, Homilies 1-30 (ff. 2r-62r); Augustine of Hippo, Sermones (Sermo 173) (ff. 63r- 64v);Isidore of Seville, De Differentis (ff. 65v-89r); Bede, De Natura Rerum (ff. 90r-99r); Anselm, De libero arbitrio (ff. 100r-108r).
  • Harley MS 3022 Collection of texts on theology, instruction and natural history (Italy, 14th century) — 1. Giles of Rome (Aegidius Romanus), De regimine principum (ff. 1r-32r); 2. Aristotle, De natura animalium (ff. 32v-54v);3. The Life of St Veridianus (ff. 55r-57v);4. Cassiodorus, Varia (ff. 57v-67v);5. Cassiodorus, De anima (ff. 68r-79v);6. Augustine, Speculum (ff. 80r-83v); 7. Augustine, Soliloquia (ff. 83v-128v);8. Pseudo-Augustine, Liber de vita Christiana (ff. 129r-139v).
  • Harley MS 3035 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae and De natura rerum (Germany, 1495) — much the same as the earlier one, but with five letters of Isidore. 

The one that stands out for me is the ms. of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, and for an unusual reason.  The work was given chapter divisions by Pliny himself, as the preface indicates.  But did he also mark them in the text?  Were there numerals in the margins?  The colloquium on meta-textual elements at Chantilly in 1994 contained a paper discussing this, and noting that the editors of Pliny were “fort discrets” on these points.

It would be most interesting to know.  Ideally we would want pre-humanist manuscripts, of course; but it would still be interesting to know what this manuscript has.

Share

Russian State Library Methodius mss

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Well, I’ve now managed to create two PDF’s of page images of  the Old Slavic manuscripts of Methodius, one of ms. 40 and one of ms. 41.  The contents of the two mss are different, tho.  The PDF’s are really too large to use.

I wonder if there is a catalogue around anywhere, that would tell us what these mss. contain.

Share

Google translate, on the Slavonic manuscripts of the Russian State Library

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m having some fun using Google translate to allow me to browse the online Slavonic manuscripts of the Russian State Library.  Occasionally the results are comic: “Number 140. The Psalter of St. sensible” made me smile, although it is combined with a text by Athanasius.

The manuscripts are those of the Moscow Theological Seminary, the Trinity-Sergius Lavra.  I think we should thank the RSL for putting all these images online!

The start of the collection is here, starting with 3 mss called “Gospel” and then 4 more labelled “Apostle”.  The next 3 are Psalms.  A bit further on are three copies in Slavic of the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, closely followed by some copies of Basil the Great on Fasting.

Number 32 looks interesting — is that actually Severian of Gaballa on the six days of creation? “Six days Severian bishop Gavalskogo”?  That must be his sermons on Genesis.  Who knew that these existed in Slavic?

Then the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, a John Damascene, Ephraim Syrus, and the Ladder of John Climacus. 

No. 63 is also Severian.  No 75 is Cosmas Indicopleustes.  No. 100 is the Annals of George Hamartolus.  No 102 is Cosmas Indicopleustes again.  Isaac the Syrian appears as 151.  167 is The Imitation of Christ by a certain Thomas Kempiyskago.

Later on the items of interest — interesting to us here, anyway, for I suspect much of this is of the highest interest to students of Russian history — grow fewer.  I notice the occasional 18th century text, and the odd one in Greek or Latin.  No. 338 is “collected works of the Fathers and Lucian” (?) which sounds interesting.  There are Greek and Latin dictionaries. No. 351 (Gr. 188) is by Theodoret of Cyrhus, “On the fishery of God”.

It is, truly, a marvellous collection.  I am deeply grateful that they have set up the website in such a web that those of us who know no Russian can still use it, and learn more than one could possibly imagine.

The entry point, in case you want to browse, is:

http://www.stsl.ru/manuscripts/index.php?col=5&gotomanuscript=01

 And there is a marvellous aerial picture of the St. Sergius Lavra here at the English language site:

http://www.stsl.ru/languages/en/index.php

Share

Manuscripts of the Old Slavonic Methodius online!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A commenter has discovered two manuscripts of the Old Slavonic Methodius online!  The manuscripts used by Michael Chub, when he edited some of the works, are apparently accessible:

Some good news. I found the scans of two Old Slavic manuscripts used by Archbishop Mikhail.

See http://www.stsl.ru/manuscripts/index.php?col=5&gotomanuscript=040, the first two manuscripts (40 and 41) from the list.

Sadly one can’t download the things as PDF’s — they’d be much easier to look at in that form!

Share

Should we expect a translation when a scholar prints a previously unpublished text?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

At the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, cataloguer Adam McCollum has written an interesting article on whether scholars publishing newly discovered ancient texts should be obliged to translate them as well. (H/t Paleojudaica)

… the optimum scenario is to have texts and editions. No question: that way, those closely involved with the language and literature and those outside this group can both get some benefit and have opportunity and even incentive to interact with the text. And even for the eventual case of every text edition, an included translation or translations is not too much to wish for. But in our own meantime, are translations always necessary?

…  translation is always time-consuming and often hard work …. Now, producing useful editions of texts is also hard work, but not in the same way. In some cases, this latter labor can even come down to reading and transcribing manuscripts, or sometimes even a single manuscript, making perhaps some emendations here and there to correct the text, but doing so all the while having also recorded the manuscripts’ real reading…

Dr McCollum then points out that one motive for printing a translation in the past was sales — that people were reluctant to buy text-only volumes, so it was necessary to include a translation, just to make the book commercially viable.  He responds:

Electronic texts, even a PDF that can be both electronic and then physical with the push of a button, are relatively easily and very cheaply made, … they also mean more potential readers, since these resources are discoverable so simply via searching and linking.

Where would be in terms of material for Jacob of Sarug, the Syriac Martyr Acts, etc., had Paul Bedjan (or his publisher) decided that French translations were requisite for the thousands of pages he edited? I fear we would hardly have so many thousands of pages in Syriac edited by him anymore! What about Wright’s editions of the Travels of Ibn Jubayr, the Kāmil of Al-Mubarrad, and the later Syriac translation of Kalila wa-Dimna. What of Paul de Lagarde’s numerous text editions? We would be better off if all of these texts had translations, and indeed some of the texts just mentioned eventually have found their translators, but if the necessity of translation had loomed over the head of Bedjan, Wright, or Lagarde, it is hardly likely that we would have the texts edited by them that we have, and we would thus have much less within reach so much literature. …

The question for now is simply that of the title above: should scholars be required, by their own or external compulsion, in every case to produce a translation alongside any newly edited or re-edited text? My own answer, as will be obvious by now, is “no”, but I think discussion of the question may prove fruitful for the fields concerned.

These are interesting points, well made.

I think the key point being made is fairly simple.  Translating whole texts is hard and time-consuming.  It is considerably simpler and quicker simply to transcribe the manuscript, adjusting for some of the more obvious typos along the way.  If you have a lot of unedited material, and you have limited time and resources, then you can put out a lot more stuff if you do the latter, than if you do the former.  You’ll be able to make accessible to scholars a load of stuff that they could not otherwise access.  On the other hand, few people will ever be able to read the stuff you publish.

Dr McCollum’s point is obviously that of a man with a pile of manuscripts in front of him, wondering what to do with them, in any reasonable period of time.  What should he do?

Certainly publication is the most important thing.  For instance there are two scholars sitting on a Greek mathematical papyrus, which they can’t be bothered to publish, and which they alone have access to.  Doubtless the reason why they don’t publish the text is that they want to do a “commentary” and thereby enhance their own reputations.  Such behaviour is by no means novel in the world of papyrology, and is utterly poisonous.

But on the other hand, texts that are edited without translation are really only half available.  They can sit there on library shelves, untranslated, hardly used, for centuries.

It’s all a question of time and resources.

If a scholar is sitting in his ivory tower, editing one text, then I expect him to supply a translation.  Any scholar who has the time to produce a text and commentary but doesn’t include a translation is being a jerk.

Likewise an enterprise with several hundred scholars and translators should certainly include translations.  Migne managed it, after all.

But if it’s a lone scholar (or two) editing masses of stuff, I think we can cut him some slack.  Don’t worry about the translation.  The priority is to get the stuff out there in multiple copies — yes, definitely on the web, where automated translation tools make using it easier all the time — and worry about the translation later.  The burning by the mob of the Institut de l’Egypte in Cairo this week is a reminder that no text is safe sitting in an archive.  If Addai Scher had remembered this, when he discovered Theodore of Mopsuestia’s De incarnatione in a complete Syriac version in the hills of northern Persia in 1905, and had published a transcription, we would today be able to study that interesting text.  Instead it perished in the sack of his residence by Turkish troops in 1915.

Go to it, Adam.

Share

A new device for photographing manuscripts?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent writes with an interesting query about a novel book cradle for copying manuscripts.

Most used are the copy stands, and I found an Austrian system called “Traveller’s copy stand”.

But last year I saw in Athos someone using a portable device with 2 glass windows and a system allowing the camera to change position for taking pictures of both pages of an opened manuscript.

Do you happen to know the name of this device? I would like to get more info on it, but I don’t know what to look for.

Copying manuscripts is the very devil to do.  You can’t open the thing flat, so it ends up in a book rest open at 45 degrees.  You want the camera facing each page at 90 degrees.  So you have to take one side of the book, turning the pages; and then flip the book around and do the other side.  It’s a faff.

I think the “Austrian travellers’ copy stand” is mentioned here.  A description at a vendor site is here.  I wonder what it costs?

But does anyone recognise the description above?  If so, info very welcome!

UPDATE: From the comments, it seems to be the Ion Book Saver.  I want one!

UPDATE: There’s a very poor demo of it on YouTube here, but it gives an idea.  It also states that UK price will be 129 GBP.  A comment on the video says release was postponed to December 2011.

Share