Month: February 2016

The legends of St Nicholas of Myra, or Santa Claus, became known in the West through a Life composed by a certain John the Deacon, probably in the 9th century.  It was based on Greek models, especially – as it says in the prologue – on the letter of Methodius to Theodorus which has given translators so much pain lately.

A few days ago I wrote a post about the Latin text of John the Deacon.  I can find no sign of a modern edition of this text.  The text listed in the Bibliotheca Hagiographia Latina is the 18th century edition of Falconius.  But the BHL makes clear that Latin manuscripts contain any number of recensions and reworkings of this.

It seems to me that John the Deacon should exist in English.  Being medieval Latin, it should be possible for me to translate it.  In order to use my various electronic tools, I need an electronic Latin text; so today I have been at work, OCRing the 15 pages of Falconius.

I haven’t tried to OCR a Latin text for years.  It’s been a nostalgic experience, in a way.

It was always awful to OCR Latin, because none of the OCR programmes supported Latin.  So you ended up making corrections on every line.

This is no longer the case.  Abbyy Finereader 12 does support Latin.  It is making a very fair fist of the page images of Falconius.  These were downloaded from Google books and are by no means speckle free or perfect.

On the other hand, I am still correcting pretty much every line.  Why is this?

Well, Falconius is an 18th century writer.  This means that he uses the “long s”, which is a bit like “f” – “God ſave the king!” – and also that “ct” is ligatured.  Neither is recognised by Finereader.

This is rather disappointing.  Back in the early 2000’s, Abbyy was given quite a bit of German taxpayers’ money to develop OCR for “Fraktur”, the “gothic” typeface much used in Germany until Hitler banned it.  This also handled both of these features of older printed texts.  But … the resulting product was not added to Finereader!  Instead a separate product was created, unaffordable by normal people.  And so, even today, the public cannot do Fraktur OCR.  One can only wonder at the imbecility of German politicians in allowing this.

So … it’s back to manual correction.

All the same, it’s still far, far better than it ever was.  I would have killed for OCR of this quality in 1997!  On the other hand, I wish I had the eyesight that I did back then.

I also need to work out where I might find a dictionary of medieval Latin.

Sometimes you see something so outrageously false in the press that it becomes amusing, and so it was today.

Sarah Vine, better known as the wife of British Conservative politician Michael Gove, wrote an article in the Daily Mail today: Why Islam is a feminist issue: Most Muslims lead decent lives. But, ignored by the PC brigade, mass migration and multi-culturalism have encouraged, among some, a deeply worrying contempt for women.  Much of this was a brave attempt to state some obvious facts unpalatable to those who control the state.

Unfortunately in such papers any criticism of Islam must be “balanced” by some “all religions are the same” jeer at Christianity.  So she felt obliged to add the following:

Of course Islam is not the only religion built on misogyny. Christianity, and in particular Catholicism, has historically had a warped attitude to women at its heart.

We venerate the Virgin as the only truly good woman who ever lived, a woman who conceived a male saviour in chastity to deliver us from the actions of Eve, that wicked, weak-willed temptress whose lust and betrayal brought misery upon the world.

When you think about it, that’s pretty anti-women.

But the key difference between the misogyny in the Bible and that in the Koran is that no one in their right mind would interpret the former word for word.

Those who do — Christian fundamentalists — are rightly seen as bonkers by the rest of the Christian community, a remnant of a bygone age.

It took hundreds of years for feminists — male and female — to extricate society from the clutches of the medieval Church.

The efforts of the Suffragettes and the work of 20th-century feminism was the culmination of that lengthy process, bringing about a permanent change in cultural, legal and social attitudes, and a shift in the balance between the sexes from one based on the innate superiority of men to the present uneasy state of equality.

Of course there are huge numbers of other errors in these words, and not merely the horrible old fallacy of the false equivalence.

For instance, we bible-believing literalist Christians are not exactly a tiny number.  I do quite believe that we are not found in whatever tiny circle of London socialites the author belongs; but perhaps she should get out more.

Likewise the statement of Catholic theology is horribly wrong; so why is it prefixed with “we”?

But none of this struck me so forcibly as the blindness of the author to what all men know, and what she herself believes.

Because we do have a word for the medieval attitude to women.  It’s called chivalry.

And this is the weekend of a medieval literalistic bible-believing Christian festival.  It’s called “Saint Valentine’s Day”.

We poor, benighted, fundamentalists created the treatment of women that Sarah Vine would be outraged to be denied.

Who can doubt that, if Mr Gove doesn’t take his wife out to dinner for that particular medieval ritual of Valentine’s Day tomorrow, and show plenty of that medieval attitude of chivalry, then he will find himself in very hot water!

Let us wish Miss Vine / Mrs Gove a happy Valentine’s Day, and a little more self-awareness.

UPDATE: Wrong husband’s name – fixed.