Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
I have spent a couple of hours online attempting to locate some evidence of an introductory work to Old Slavonic literature. This has been in vain, although guides to the language are common enough. The only text I have found is an 1883 SPCK publication here.
Does anyone know of such a guide to what exists in Old Slavonic; like a patrology in organisation?
A comment on this post leads us to a wonderland of Old Slavonic patristic manuscripts, all online and in full colour. I will repeat some of the information here.
I wonder if you know about this website: http://www.stsl.ru/manuscripts . This an online collection of manuscripts from the former library of St.Sergius Monastery near Moscow, now in the Russian National Library.
Now I know no Cyrillic. But Google translate does!
The Russian-text images on the left are not translated, but if you hover the mouse over them, English text appears!
Then I clicked on the “Main Library” link. This takes you straight to a catalogue. OK, it’s a bit wonky, and you have to be a bit imaginative, but it’s perfectly usable for English-speakers, thanks to Google; and this link takes us to a list of manuscripts in the main library collection. And if you click on the book, you get a detailed catalogue of the ms, and then a box at the bottom to ask for the folio! This is SUPER!!!
There are loads of biblical manuscripts in here. Of course you have to wade through synodicons, and all the stuff that makes up the bulk of ecclesiastical libraries. But … this is simply splendid!
My next stop was the search facility. As expected, entering “eusebius” made no sense to the Cyrillic engine. So I went back to Google translate, entered “Eusebius” into it and got out “Евсевий” in Russian. I tried this; but it didn’t work. Then I tried “Gregory”, got “Григорий” and tried that. That didn’t work either. Hum. Lack of a search engine we can use is a problem.
Another collection is here. These are not as well catalogued, but the images are top-notch. Dionysius the Areopagite, the “Creation Methodius of Patara”… hmm!. #75 is a Slavonic ms of Cosmas Indicopleustes! #100 is the Annals of George Hamartolus; 102 is Cosmas again; 146 is Chrysostom. I got to ca. 239, but have to stop there.
The mss are late, but so what? They’re accessible!!!
But all the same, this is really wonderful! The images are gorgeous, undefiled, and quite fit for any scholarly study imaginable (other than examining the stitching of the book!) Frankly this is how it should be done! Who, I wonder, did this? I wish I knew the names of those involved, for they deserve a big cheer!
A number of ante-Nicene writers exist in an translation in Old Slavonic.
I think all of these are extracts, tho.
Unfortunately now I look at it, I’m finding Harnack’s text almost impossible to understand!
What do you do, when you find that the mediaeval Greeks carelessly forgot to preserve a copy of some patristic text in which you are interested? Well, you have a couple of choices.
Firstly you can go and search manuscript libraries and see if you can find it. This option is rarely exercised, since dealing with many Greek libraries is only just preferable to torture.
Your other alternative is to see if anyone translated it into something else, before it was lost.
This happened a lot. Back in the 5th century, the Armenians sent off an expedition to Edessa, got a whole load of Syriac books, and translated these into Classical Armenian. They also set up a monastery in Jerusalem, which translated books and sent them back to the old country. As a result we have works by Irenaeus and Eusebius extant in no other language.
Old Slavonic is another language group that came into contact with the Greek world during the Dark Ages. The language was spoken by Old Slavs (of course). Once these had been taught literacy, they too acquired Greek literature.
I’ve found in Harnack’s Geschichte der altchristlichen Litteratur bis Eusebius, Theil I, halfte 2 — which I can’t find online — a list of ante-Nicene patristic authors whose works are extant in Old Slavonic. The list is more than a century old, but I think it would be interesting to look at, for those of us who know almost nothing about that language group. More in my next post!