Month: November 2020

Stelten’s Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin arrives

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I received a copy of Leo F. Stelten’s Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin (via Amazon.com).  I’ve not really had a chance to look at it yet.

But this evening it had its first test.  John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas describes the city of Patara, the saint’s home town, as once “rutilabat”.  The Oxford Latin Dictionary gives “rutilo, -are” as “to glow with a bright or golden red colour”, especially thinking of German hair!  Nor did Neimeyer or Blaise give anything different.

Stelten passed.  In church Latin, apparently, it means “shine” or “glow”.  This makes perfect sense of John’s, um, glowing description of the city.

Clearly I need to spend more time with this book.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The third unfinished project on my desktop is a translation from the Latin of the Life of St Nicholas by John the Deacon, who lived in Naples in the middle of the 9th century.   John was bilingual, and created his work by translating the Greek Life by Methodius – the one that defeated all my translators.

It is a hard thing to pick something after a year or more, even if you are reasonably well-organised, unless you leave a file of notes written to your future self as to where you were and what you were doing.  (Memo to self: do this next time!!)  So I spent the end of yesterday and a couple of hours today trying to work out what I had, and reorganising the working directory.

The Latin text was printed by Mombritius in his Sanctuarium in 1477 or 1478 – it’s undated.  I did OCR this and create a corrected file, but then I concluded that it was a bit too rough to work with; spellings, punctuation, etc.  The text was printed again from some Vatican manuscripts by Falconius in 1751, who helpfully placed chapters 13-15 as an appendix and instead inserted a bunch of chapters from completely different Life of St Nicholas.  Luckily the BHL volume specifies this, and I had prepared an electronic text with a note to myself about just this.

I had also divided the text into 15 files, and I had started the translation of chapter 1.  I vaguely remember finding it very hard work indeed, which was why I stopped.

I’ve now sorted out the directory, and done a little more on chapter 1.  After a year of Latin, it is less difficult.  It really does help to establish exactly what the construction is, and to footnote a query if not sure, for later examination!  Mind you, in a couple of sentences I have already come across two words which are not in my QuickLatin.  The word order is horrendous sometimes, although the case of the words makes clear their function.  Was John trying to show off in his prologue, like some dull Victorian German editor, I wonder?  Let us hope that it settles down in the next chapter!

So all I need now is time and motivation.  I shall start grinding away.

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St George, 5th century “Passio” – English translation now online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The earliest account of the martyrdom of St George is palpably fictional, and probably Arian in origin.  It was composed in Greek, probably by an Arian.  It was a rather embarrassing work, and later versions remove much of the rubbish.  For this reason Matzke, who reviewed the tradition, referred confusingly to the original as the “apocryphal version” and the revised version as the “canonical version”.

Only a few leaves of the Greek of the original version exist in palimpsest.  A Latin translation of the whole does exist, however, dating from the 5th century.  An English translation of this has now been prepared.  Here it is:

The files are also available from Archive.org here.

As usual, the file is public domain.  Make whatever use of it you like, whether personal, educational or commercial.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have now got all the way through the 5th century Latin “Passecrates” Life of St George, as edited by Arndt, and I have prepared an English translation of every sentence.

What a mess the text is in!  The editor, Arndt, plainly had trouble reading the manuscript at all.  At points it makes no sense.  You get readings like “deus Christianorum”, where the sense plainly calls for “genus Christianorum”.

Fortunately a collection of five Latin Lives of St George, printed by Huber, contains a version which is very close indeed to the Arndt Life.  It does help, in working out the meaning of the text.  Indeed in the above example Huber’s text does read “genus”.

Next, I need to resolve a couple of issues, and check whether the translation makes sense and has continuity: to move away from the focus on individual sentences to paragraphs and the text as a whole.  At one point St George tells the wicked emperor that he has put St George to death three times – as you do.  It would be good to check whether the text has actually done this!

The “miracles” seem over to the top to squeamish moderns like me.  But they must have seemed over the top to those in the Dark Ages too, because all of them tone it down!

I have started to wonder whether the text is actually intended satirically, to mock the credulity of Catholics in the 5th century.  The author definitely mocks this same group, by giving a villain the name of “Athanasius”.  Maybe I shall say something like this in a note.

Onward!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It is good to have the Life of St Cuthman out of the way at last.  But it is not the only project of mine that has been stalled for many months.

More than a year ago, a kind correspondent offered to translate a very early Latin Life of St George.  He did send in drafts of all the chapters, but each requires quite a bit of revision.  Four were still outstanding when I last looked.  So I will pick this up next and try to get it completed.  The translation can only be approximate, because of the terrible state of the text.

Another project that was hardly begun, but for which a link sits on my desktop, was to translate the Latin Life of St Nicholas by John the Deacon.  This was the origin of most of the western lives of St Nicholas.  But the original Greek text was an awful thing, and the Latin of John is not easy either.

The Cuthman project taught me much.  The most important revelation was that the Vulgate bible was key to all these medieval compositions.  In a sense, all of the Latin saints’ lives are vulgate fanfic.  The language of the bible is used to create this literature of Christian fiction.

Some interesting ideas follow from this.

Firstly, if these texts are all basically based on the Vulgate, then anybody intimate with that version of the bible ought to be able to read them freely.  So it is really important to get acquainted with the Vulgate.  But …. it is much more difficult to obtain handy printed texts than it ought to be, if anyone still reads the Vulgate.  I have found, curiously, that the mobile web version of BibleGateway (link) allows you to easily display on your Android handset the Vulgate with parallel Douai translation.  This is actually easier to use than any printed text known to me!

Secondly, if we treat the legends of the Saints, not as history, but as Christian fiction, then I find that they become much more useful, and acceptable.

For Christian fiction is a really important thing, as I discovered eight years ago during a time of much personal re-evaluation.  Quite by accident I started to read novels purchased from the local Christian bookshop.  They were random; whatever that shop happened to have.  For instance I read Left Behind, and others.  I found, in so doing, that they affected my imagination in a day to day way.  I felt myself feeling closer to God, more aware of spiritual things in daily life, more aware of eternity, and less influenced by the clamour of worldly nothingnesses.

Could the legends of the saints have served the same purpose?  To enhance the devotion of the readers?  I think probably so.  They probably were always known to be fictional; bible-fanfic, essentially.  Thus such books could be composed about any figure of the bible or the fathers etc.

Maybe so; maybe I am wrong.  But it is an interesting thought all the same.

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St Cuthman, the wheelbarrow saint – Life now online in English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have today completed my translation of the medieval “Life” of St Cuthman.  Unlike most anglosaxon saints, Cuthman was a peasant.  He founded the church of Steyning in Sussex.  He is noted for carrying his mother about with him in a wheelbarrow!

Here is the translation, together with the text that I translated and some introductory material:

The files may also be found at Archive.org here.

As usual, these files are public domain.  Do whatever you like with them, whether personal, educational or commercial.

A 14th century manuscript, the Luttrell Psalter, preserves a depiction of a cart almost identical to St Cuthman’s wheelbarrow:

Luttrell psalter (BL add ms 42130), f.186r – medieval invalid carriage like St Cuthman’s wheelbarrow

It does not look very comfortable to me!

It has taken almost a year to complete the translation of this short piece, with a six month break for work in the middle.  I have worked on it fairly carefully, as a vehicle to add syntactical information to my Latin tool, QuickLatin.  No doubt it still contains errors, but it is the first complete English translation known to me.

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