Mike Aquilina of Way of the Fathers has drawn my attention to a Vatican Radio announcement: 256 Vatican manuscripts have gone online. A list by shelfmark is here. They are mostly from the Palatine collection, which in turn contains a lot of the loot from the ancient monastery of Lorsch, destroyed during the 30 years war.
Here are a few highlights:
- Pal. lat. 2 – Old Testament, Lorsch, 9th c. (followed by a considerable number of biblical mss.; as far as Pal. lat. 68)
- Pal. lat. 57 – The catalogue of the library at Lorsch. Yay! I have so wanted to see this.
- Pal. lat. 150 – Ignatius, Polycarp, Hermas; plus letters and life of Anthony, and the sayings of Sextus.
- Pal. lat. 153 – Chrysostom on Hebrews.
- Pal. lat. 162 – Lactantius; and Claudian.
- Pal. lat. 170 – ps.Hegesippus.
There’s then a lot of Jerome and Augustine. Then:
- Pal. lat. 235 – Paulinus of Nola. 8th century, from Northumbria in the UK.
- Pal. lat. 873 – Livy (1st decade). 15th c. Lots of copies of this work.
- Pal. lat. 881 – Caesar, Gallic War, etc. 15th c.
- Pal. lat. 883 – Sallust; also Eutropius’ Breviarium, plus Ausonius. 12th c.
- Pal. lat. 886 – Macrobius; Historia Augusta; Fulgentius. 9th c. The webpage doesn’t specify what by each.
- Pal. lat. 888 – Seneca, Sallust. 12-15 c.
- Pal. lat. 898 – Suetonius
- Pal. lat. 1571 – Vegetius, plus Frontinus’ Strategems. 12th c.
- Pal. lat. 1577 – Martinus Capella, Macrobius, Pliny the Elder. 11th c.
- Pal. lat. 1578 – Fulgentius Mythographicus
- Pal. lat. 1646 – Servius. 11th c.
- Pal. lat. 1701 – Juvenal. 10th c.
- Pal. lat. 1706 – Glosses on Juvenal.
- Reg. lat. 118 – Cyprian. 9th c. No index of contents on web page.
- Lat. 3314 – Porphyrio’s commentary on Horace.
All this on a fairly quick glance plus some random clicking. It is an excellent selection.
The index pages for some of the manuscripts need more information. But this is a minor point. A PDF download would also be nice to have.
I hope that someone will do a proper list of all the mss. and their contents. I would do it, but I am still somewhat unwell.
An alternative version of this collection is available by the University Library Heidelberg and you can use them there:
.
Also, BAV has some bibliographic support for literature on MSs (accessible e. g. by shelfmarks):
Best, Neven
Oh shucks… Vat. Pal. Lat. 220 is among them… just recently (in Dec ’12) I had paid for a partial copy of that MS, for the Apocalypse of Thomas. All the other MSS of ApcThom have been published in journals, but not the MS P.
Well, now we know who fought Murphy’s Law to bring us these mss. Thanks, DIVUS IULIUS!
Btw, love your punctuation. Classy!
Stevenson’s Catalogue (only as far as Pal.lat.291) is on Archive (search “Codices Palatini…”). Don’t know why they didn’t put up 234, because they made a digital copy of it for me a few years ago – prob. because Bischoff (incorrectly) refused to list it for Lorsch. The first part of Pal.lat. 234 is certainly Lorsch, but somebody “borrowed” the first quire which should contain the Sentences of Sixtus.
Thank you for the info about the catalogue – useful!
I suspect that this work was actually done by Heidelberg, and the Vatican haven’t done much themselves.
Wrong! Stevenson (Englishman) was a scriptor at BAV, as was his father – who worked on catalogue of Greek mss.