Tag: Manuscripts

Some notes on chapter divisions in ancient books

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve always been interested in the question of when chapter divisions and chapter titles arrived in ancient books.  Various articles on the subject have passed through my hands in recent days as I converted photocopies to PDF’s, and again I found them interesting.  But in those days the German sources, Birt and Bergk, were inaccessible to me, being large books in large libraries, not to be borrowed and scarcely to be photocopied.  I wonder if they have made it onto the web?

Quite by chance I found this material online in V. H. Stanton’s The Gospels as Historical Documents, Cambridge, 1903, p.22f (here). 

THE FORM OF ANCIENT BOOKS AS AFFECTING HABITS OF QUOTATION.

I. The only kind of division of the subject-matter which was ever common in Greek and Roman Literature even to the sixth century A.D. was “the book,” in the sense of a portion of a larger work. The book in this sense, as the names for it in Greek and Latin (bi/bloj and bi/blion, volumen, also later and more rarely to/moj) imply, corresponded originally and normally with the contents of a roll. (See Birt, Antike Buckwesen esp. chh. 3, 5 and 7, comparing Bergk, Griechische Literaturgeschichte I. p. 226 f.) For the most part works which could be comprised within a roll of moderate proportions — as for example most of Plato’s Dialogues and even the longer writings of the New Testament could be — had no divisions, and larger works no lesser ones.

Only in the case of works of a few authors do we hear of chapters or headings (kefa/laia, capita, also called ti/tloi) which served to break up the text into portions. The scholiasts and commentators upon Aristotle speak of such in his treatises. In the main this evidence belongs to the third and following centuries A.D.; but the divisions in question may, at least in some instances, have been early introduced and traditionally preserved.

Yet they do not seem to have been employed in all his works. The Constitution of Athens, in the recently recovered papyrus MS. of it, is without them (see Kenyon’s ed. p. xviii.). Moreover, so far as I have observed, the scholiasts and commentators themselves, though they mention chapters when discussing the question how a treatise should be analysed, rarely refer to statements, opinions or words as contained in such and such a chapter. Commonly they give only the philosopher’s name, or the treatise, or book of the treatise, with an indication sometimes that the passage will be found near the beginning, or the end, of a treatise, or book. In writers earlier than the fourth century A.D. this vague mode of reference is, I believe, universal.

Moreover, the works other than those of Aristotle, which were divided into chapters, seem to have been chiefly those which consisted of a series of articles, such as collections of marvellous stories, books on Natural History and Botany, medical, and probably also legal, books. Clement of Alexandria (circ. A.D. 200) also seems to have divided his Miscellanies into chapters. “Let this second Miscellany,” he writes at the close of the second book, “here terminate on account of the length and number of the chapters.”

The only instance of a reference to a numbered chapter appears to be that in Cassiodorus (Lib. Lit. ch. 3, Migne, voL LXX. col. 1204) to “the ninth chapter of the first book of the Antiquities of Josephus.” These numbers may have been inserted in the Latin translation which Cassiodorus himself caused to be made (Div. Lit. ch. 17, Migne, ib. col. 1133). [For the instances given, see Bergk, ib. p. 233, Birt, ib. p. 157.

To the examples of works with headings quoted by these writers, Dioscorides on Plants and Roots may be added, see Palaeographical Society’s Publications, I. plate 177. On the other hand, they are both, I believe, in error when they state that Symmachus’ copy of Seneca had chapters. The reference to Seneca by Migne (ap. Symm. Ep. x. 27), or some other editor, introduced within a bracket, has, it would seem, been mistaken for part of Symmachus’ text. Of the employment of any subdivisions of chapters there is no trace whatever. The word tmh~ma (section) is indeed used, but only as an equivalent for kefa/laion].

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284 Greek manuscripts online at the British Library

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I learn from here via here that Juan Garces, the go-ahead curator of Greek manuscripts at the British Library, has got 284 manuscripts online.  It’s well worth browsing the four pages of the list.  There’s a manuscript of Zosimus New History in there, for instance.  Despite pleas from Biblical people, it’s mostly classical or patristic or bits and pieces, which is all to the good.  Synesius is well-represented too.

Note that the short list in the browse is not everything.  If you click on one of the text links you get a break down of all that the manuscript contains.  Works in the TLG are given the TLG reference too.

Turning the pages is quick and easy, thankfully, unlike early and very clunky online interfaces.  This one is almost usable!

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Manuscripts of the history of John bar Penkaye

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The seventh century Syriac writer John bar Penkaye wrote various works, according to Ebed-Jesu, most of which have perished or are extant still only in manuscript.  One that has attracted attention is a chronicle in fifteen chapters.  The last of these deals with the rise of Islam, and, since it was written within the century, is nearly contemporaneous.

Today I had an email from a researcher working for the BBC asking about the manuscripts of the work.  I must say that I don’t know!

At BYU there is a copy of Mingana’s edition of the last 5 chapters, in Sources Syriaques.  From this I learn that Mingana edited the text with French translation from two manuscripts, one in his own collection, truncated at the end, which he labelled M; and one from the Chaldean Patriarchate in Mosul, written in 1840 but copied from a manuscript written in 1262.  

Searching for “John bar Penkaye” in vol. 1 of the catalogue of the Mingana collection, I find that his copy is now Mingana Syriac 179, completed 22nd September 1928 and written at Alkosh.  In the catalogue the text is called The beginning of words, but Mingana refers to the Sources Syriaques publication.

Apparently there is a review of the manuscripts in T. Jansma, “Projet d’edition du ktaba dres melle de Jean bar Penkaye”, OS 8 (1963) p.96-100.  (I would imagine that “OS” is “L’Orient Syrien”!) Sebastian Brock translated the end of book XIV and most of book XV into English.

Steven Ring has a list of manuscripts here:

  • Baghdad, formerly Moṣul Chaldean Patriarchate Ms 26 dated 1875 AD from an exemplar dated AG 1573 = 1261 or 1262 AD, [74], p. 13
  • Alqosh Ms 25 dated 1882, [66], p. 489
  • Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican Syr 497
  • Birmingham University Library, Mingana Ms 179 dated 1928
  • Manchester, Rylands 43, a fragment c. 1915, [56], p. 167 f.

He adds: “See also, Anton Baumstark 1922, pp. 210 – 211 who lists other Mss in note 14 on p. 210.”

kjhkhk

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How the works of the elder Seneca get to us

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Seneca the elder has left us two works, the Controversiae in 10 books and the Suasoriae in 2 books.  Both are textbooks on how to address a Roman court.  A supposed case is proposed: e.g. a priest is burned rescuing the image of Minerva from a burning temple.  Now because a priest must be whole in body, some say he cannot be a priest.   Seneca states the case, and then gives arguments that an orator might make, first for one side, then for the other.  He isn’t concerned with the “right” answer, so much as showing how to argue the case.  Each book of cases is given a preface, in which Seneca talks about orators of the past.

The works do not reach us intact, although they travelled down the centuries together.  In fact we have two kinds of manuscript.

Firstly there are manuscripts which contain the complete text of the Controversiae, plus the two books of the Suasoriae.  Unfortunately none of these manuscripts gives all ten books of the Controversiae.  They give books 1, 2, 7, 9 and 10, complete.  And they only include the prefaces to books 7, 9 and 10.

Three manuscripts are important for this form of the text.  First there is Antwerp 411 (=A), from the end of the 9th or start of the 10th century, and written in eastern France.  Brussels 9594 (=B) is slightly earlier, from the third quarter of the 9th century and north-eastern France.  Both manuscripts have suffered damage, and contain superficial corruptions but a basically sound text.  Then there is Vatican latin. 3872 (=V), of the same date as B and from Corbie, which is independent of A and B.  The text seems to be the result of ‘correction’, either in late antiquity or the middle ages.

Fortunately we have another line of transmission.  At some point down the years, probably in the 5th century, someone made extracts from all ten books of the Controversiae, and included the prefaces.  We have manuscripts of this edited version, although once again prefaces have been lost.  But this gives us prefaces for books 1-4, 7 and 10, filling the gap for prefaces in the first family. 

The most important manuscript of this family is Montpellier 126 (=M), again written in the third quarter of the 9th century, partly in hands with the distinctive letter-forms of the abbey of Reims.  There are numerous later manuscripts, all derived from M.  But there are also four leaves of a manuscript written around 800 AD, Bamberg Msc. Class. 45m, which is close in type to M.

The end result is that we get the prefaces for books 1 and 2, which we have in the full text form, plus prefaces for books 3 and 4, where the text is extracts; books 5 and 6 and 8 just the extracts; and books 7, 9 and 10 complete.

When  thinking about how manuscripts reach us, it is  always useful to see what is normal.   Most of the general public are not familiar with this, and consequently invent their own imaginary standards of “reliable transmission of texts”.  It is unfortunate that a professional text critic, Bart Ehrman, has published several books which encourage this tendency to suppose that books do not reach us from antiquity.  Only this weekend I had to respond to a post by one of his idiot disciples, who had decided that the bible could not possibly reach us because … there are different textual families!  It is difficult not to feel that Ehrman deserves such an audience, the natural consequence of publishing books that lead the public to suppose that textual criticism is pointless.

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Downloading the Iliad

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve pointed some mirroring software at the Centre for Hellenic Studies site where they have online some high-resolution images of the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad.  It’s been downloading images for the last three hours, and has managed a princely 37 files so far.   It might take a while, methinks!

The reason is that the images are around 17mb each.  They’re splendid, make no mistake.  I opened one using the Windows browser and zoomed in, and quite by accident got text reading “ILIADOS A” – the start of the Iliad.  The commentary in the margin is clearly visible, although a bit faded, but no doubt some graphics manipulations — perfectly possible with such high-resolution images — would make them all brilliantly clear.

But I doubt many people will download a copy.  Broadband technology just is not up to it yet. 

It reminds me of the late 90’s, when we all wanted to put images online but all we had was dial-up connections.  A few things did make their way online, but were painful to get hold of.  It required a step-change in internet access speeds before multimedia and PDF’s and such like could become commonplace.

Similarly mss photographed like this will remain limited in number for now.  But their time will come!

We can only congratulate the CHS for their foresight in making these available.   These are treasures, and signal the next stage of the development of the web.

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More on the ancient Greek and Latin at Google

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A few days ago I gave a link to 500 ancient Greek and Latin texts at Google.  What I had not realised was that this list was not just a bunch of pointers, but a new set of scans, done at high resolution specifically to aid OCR.  A reader has emailed me a link to an article on the Inside Google Books blog — itself new to me. This states, after an intro:

I’m pleased to announce that Google Books is now assisting this work by sharing high-resolution digital scans of over 500 volumes of Ancient Greek and Latin, dating from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. (Of course, downloadable versions of over a million volumes in all fields are available from books.google.com, in a more compressed form.) Jon Orwant and I created this collection using a list of several thousand important Classics volumes identified by our collaborators Professor Gregory Crane and Alison Babeu of Tufts University. We are analyzing additional volumes and expect to be able to release more high-resolution scans in the future.

These scans will aid the development of accurate OCR (Optical Character Recognition) algorithms for Ancient Greek, and provide the basis for electronic versions of important editions of these Classics texts; but perhaps their greatest value will be for the development of new methods in this emerging field. We’re honored that Professor Crane called this donation “a major contribution to what scholars can do.”

It also mentions something equally interesting:

… scholars around the world can now consult a high-resolution digital scan of Venetus A, one of the best manuscripts of the Iliad, at the Center for Hellenic Studies.

Mind you, I find on linking to it that someone at the website decided to block people using Internet Explorer.  That’s strange, but a minor thing.  The great thing is to get the thing online.

Among the manuscripts of the Iliad, one of the oldest and most important is the manuscript in the Biblioteca Marciana, shelfmark gr. 822.  This is given the reference letter (=siglum) “A” in the editions.  It is not merely a very important copy, beautifully written, nor merely one of the oldest outside of the very extensive papyrus fragments.  It also contains the ancient scholia to the text, originating in the text critical school at the Museum in Alexandria ca. 150 BC.   I have yet to manage to see any of the pages, thanks to the quirk above, but it can only be a very good thing indeed!

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The manuscripts of Socrates Scholasticus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have Gunther Christian Hansen’s evidently excellent new critical text in the Berlin GCS series of Socrates Scholasticus before me.  So I have placed online a summary of what he says about the extant manuscripts of that work, plus their translations into Armenian, Syriac, etc.  The notes are here.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Cambridge University Library is going to put Codex Bezae online, or so I read in a Daily Telegraph story.   Better still, they’re preparing to put all their books online, and make them freely available.  That’s what we want to hear.

Anne Jarvis, the university Librarian, said that the exciting new plans would open up priceless collections to students worldwide.

She said: “Our library contains evidence of some of the greatest ideas and discoveries over two millennia.

“We want to make it accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world with an internet connection and a thirst for knowledge.

Good for them!  Codex Bezae will be in the first tranche, as — at little pointlessly — will be a Gutenberg bible. 

I hope they attract lots of funding.  This will be the first UK library to take mass free access seriously, and if they do it, will probably guarantee the existence of the library into the digital age.

Dan Wallace and the chaps at CSNTM who photograph manuscripts of the bible were in Cambridge trying to negotiate access.  I suspect their efforts — seemingly fruitless at the time — probably helped change minds and create expectations at CUL.

I’m increasingly impressed with what Anne Jarvis is doing.  I’ve just discovered that even people like me — readers not part of the university — can use the library Wifi network if we get a ‘Lapwing ticket’, valid for a limited period.  It doesn’t look as if they charge, either, which is as it should be.  Lack of access to electronic resources is a real pain for the occasional visitor, and they have addressed it.

I have also received my copy of Croke and Harries, Religious conflict in fourth century Rome, and started to read it.  Lots of excellent texts in translation. 

But it’s much too sunny today to be sat in doors, so I went off to Norwich today instead.

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Parker library on the web… or rather, not

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A BBC News item caught my eye.

One of the most important collections of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts – for centuries kept at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge – has been entirely digitised, and is now available on the internet.

The college’s Parker Library holds more than 550 documents – including the 6th Century St Augustine Gospels, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the earliest history written in English.

Sounds exciting, hey?

Well, it isn’t.  True, the manuscripts have been photographed.  True the images are web-connected.  But no, you can’t see them.  All you can see is low-resoltution images where the text is too fuzzy to read.  All the indexes, list of contents, are all locked.

Why not?  Well, just guess.  That’s right — money money money.  They want to be paid.

Corpus Christi College consumes substantial quantities of public money each year.  It is, in theory, a private institution.  In practice it is almost entirely reliant on the tax payer.  There is something a little distasteful about a body so hugely privileged for centuries, indeed from the time of Henry VIII on, engaged in trying to charge the man in the street for access. 

Whether what they are doing is immoral I do not know.  But it does compare very unfavourably with Google books, Google streetview, Google mail, with the GPS satellite navigation… the list of US-based generosity could go on indefinitely.  If those items had been UK-based, they would all be charging for access.

I don’t want to pillory those involved.  But I feel sadness all the same.  It feels so small-minded, so ignoble, to prevent the ordinary man from reading the pages.  It’s not as if anyone but institutions will ever subscribe anyway.

The gentlemen of Corpus of a previous generation would have considered such money-grabbing ungentlemanly.  It is a pity that Corpus today, for whatever reason, does not feel the same.

The website is here, for all the use it is.

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Manuscripts for sale

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Got a spare 20,000-50,000 euros?  Why not buy a manuscript?  Listed in that price range are a renaissance copy of Vegetius, The art of war.  Or you might fancy a handwritten copy of some works by St. Cyprian. 

And what, after all, in these days of devaluation, is 50,000 euros?  Not a lot, really; not when you consider that computer programmers working in the City of London can earn 700 euros a day, or around 168,000 euros in a year of 48 weeks.  One of our Merchant Banking princes would probably consider it pocket change.

Well!  I wish I earned anything like that.  I’d find many uses for the money that would  benefit us all.  So beneficial, indeed, would I be that I wonder why a grateful government has not simply stepped forward and volunteered me the money.  It seems inexplicable, really.  But that’s one of life’s little mysteries.

Returning to seriousness, tho, it is really very interesting to see what a couple of common 15th century mss are worth on the market.  It is far less, in truth, than I had thought.  Of course it is quite beyond my means.  I suspect that is a good thing.  After all, while it is easy to buy such items, how easy is it to get them off the shelf when you are done with them?  Never buy a book without knowing how you will get rid of it.  Trust me on this.

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