I’ve been looking for manuscripts of the “Life” of St Nicholas by John the Deacon. In the process I have just come across something very useful.
This is the “Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Online” (although it doesn’t contain the BHL info) or Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina manuscripta (BHLms) database. And … it is free! You have to enter your name and email address,but then you can do what you want.
It’s hosted at the Société des Bollandistes. Look under “online resources“. The direct URL is here. Click on Recherche, enter your name and email address (why?) and then you are in.
I clicked on “Trouver un texte hagiographique d’après son numéro BHL“, and entered 6104, which is the BHL number for the first part https://www.faychildrensclinic.com/clomid/ of John the Deacon’s Life. This led to a page on the text, and then
Liste des manuscrits transmettant ce texte, décrits dans les catalogues des Bollandistes: par fonds ou par siècle.
Clicking on “fonds” – i.e. the libraries that hold the manuscripts – gave me a list ordered by library. “siècle” gave me an even more useful list, in date order, thereby allowing me to concentrate on the earliest mss. What I got was this:
Note the statement at the top: 121 manuscripts counted in the catalogues published by the Bollandists. That too is useful information.
The links do not lead to online manuscripts. So it’s Google time.
Googling for “Chartres manuscrits” led me to a web page. From this I learned that the Americans bombed Chartres in the war and destroyed half of its manuscripts, and cooked the rest. But some survive. A full list is here. It turned out that the Bollandist “Ms. 68” now has the shelfmark ms.27, and … appears in the list of destroyed manuscripts. So no luck, then. The link to the catalogue info for it is here.
Googling for “Orleans manuscrits”, the next item, brought up a website alright: the “Aurelia – Bibliotheque numerique d’Orleans“. I entered “342” in the search, and, among other cruft, got nothing useful. I saw one manuscript had leading zeroes, so on a whim I tried 0342. This gave me a picture of a manuscript cover and “Views de saints et Sermons”, 342, Xe, XIe, et XII siecles”. That looked OK, so I clicked on it and got … catalogue stuff, here. A bit more experimenting and I found you have to click on the *image* itself. There are facilities to download the manuscript, but unfortunately someone – a paperpusher, one fears – has limited it to 4 pages at a time.
The Life is supposedly at the start, but the very first page that one sees is damaged. There are several references to where to buy cenforce St Nicholas tho. It looks as if the cover was removed at some point, and the parchment is worn by being coverless for some period. Turning the page reveals pen trials; turning again reveals a modern list of contents, and then the first page of the text (click to enlarge):
The note at the top of the page – “Monasterii sancti Benedicti Floriacensi” – tells us that prior to the French revolution the ms. belonged to the Benedictine abbey of Fleury. So here is yet another manuscript online, although it took a fair bit of clicking to get it.
The Bollandist list of mnuscripts is inevitably incomplete. I know of other manuscripts of this particular Latin text, thanks to the entry in the Clavis Scriptorum Latinorum Medii Aevi: Italiae volume, which has an entry for John the Deacon / John of Naples, and which was the source that led me to the BHL where to buy Clomid? Online. But it’s still an invaluable resource.
Recommended.