We take for granted the availability of so much on the internet, that it can come as a shock when we need to go and physically find articles and books. Of course even 20 years ago, that was routine. But not every language group has kept up. German articles in particular are very hard to obtain online. Finding myself in need of three of these, today I drove 200 miles to my nearest research library in order to photocopy them. I’m feeling frankly very stiff from the journey, even though it was a good journey! The physical pain of scholarship is quite something!
These days the “photocopier” is a multi-function device (MFD). I had to work out how to use it but it was much quicker than the old photocopiers. Usefully it had a feature to email scans to me, picking up my email address from my user account. In days of yore I had to type in the email address with a very awful on-screen keypad, and in practice any more than 3 pages just conked out. There was a small notice telling the user that files over 50 pages would probably not send! I only saw this after doing one! Of course the scan went to my spam box. But it was really very good. And … they don’t seem to charge for scans, only for photocopies.
They used to have a room full of photocopiers, but this has closed and the machines are scattered around the building. This meant a long walk to find a free MFD. In busy times I would imagine that you’d get very fit!
I’ve started to look at all the references given online for the use of “theotokos” – “mother of God” in 3rd century literature. I dealt with Origen in a previous post. I’m currently working on Dionysius of Alexandria’s “Letter to Paul of Samosata”. The letter seems to be spurious; possibly an Apollinarian forgery of the late 4th century, possibly later still. I’ll know more when I have read today’s trove of articles.
I had trouble finding the Greek text, and I found it in Mansi’s Concilia vol. 1. This states that the facing Latin translation is that of Turrianus. Turrianus is Francisco Torres, in the 16th century, but I had a devil of a time trying to identify the work in which he made this translation. After a huge amount of searching online, I did find the details, and found the book itself on Google Books. It turns out that his book was pretty much reprinted literally in Mansi, and in collections like Labbe in between. What they did not print was his endnotes – “scholia” as he called them – which will be interesting to look at.
On a whim I have decided to run Turrianus’ translation through Google translate, polish it up, and make it available online. I’m about halfway through. The modern Latin is not difficult as such. If there was a Google translate for ancient Greek, and if there was OCR for ancient Greek, then one could do that. Sadly there is not. We do what we can.
The scripture references are reprinted in every case from Turrianus, and always very small and blob-like. Turrianus is quite happy to offer “Philipp. 2” for an allusion, so I am looking up each of them in the Vulgate. Most are just vague similarities. It is amusing to see that nobody before me has made them more precise: such as “Philippians 2:7-8”!
The critical text was printed by E. Schwartz in the 1920s, and this was one of the items that I got today. I have just checked, and he gives proper scripture references. That will save me pain. His remarks on text should also be interesting.
If you don’t know it already it would be worth trying the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalogue (https://kvk.bibliothek.kit.edu/index.html). It is exceptionally good for bibliographical research in general and for finding digitised material especially. And of course it’s very strong on German material.
Thank you – will look!