From my diary: more on Ephraem Latinus, “De Beatitudine Animae”

Finding myself slightly at a loose end yesterday, I found myself thinking about Ephraem Latinus.  This is a small collection of sermons in Latin (the so-called “paruum corpus sermonum”), mostly translated from Ephraem Graecus in antiquity.  I thought about making a post on these; and then I discovered that I did just that in 2018, here.

The post suggested that making an electronic text might be a helpful thing to do, and so I thought that  I might give it a go.  I’ve written elsewhere about De beatitudine animae, and so that was the obvious candidate.  The ancient Latin translation is CPL 1143ii.

But where to find a text to transcribe?  These texts have never been edited critically.  The link on my original post suggested only two sources; an incunable by Piscator, and Assemani’s 18th century edition.  But the latter turned out to contain only a modern translation, not the ancient Latin translation.  The incunable certainly had the stuff, and there was a link to the Darmstadt university copy.  But then I found that the online copy was too low a resolution to read!  I dropped a note to Darmstadt – after all nobody can use what they had there – and I got a very quick reply and a zip file of .jpg files in a better resolution.  I was rather impressed with their professionalism.

Here’s the opening portion of the text (ugh!).  Note how “Ca.I” is 4 lines before the first words of the text, “Beatus qui odio”?

But meanwhile I had started to look at manuscripts.  These were mostly in Bavaria, at the BSB library.  Reluctantly I started to transcribe the text from one of them, with some difficulty.  Here’s another, BSB Clm 14364:

Thankfully then I learned of another edition, printed in 1563 by Menchusius.  This was not hard to find, and proved to have the text, in a form that could be OCR’d.  Unfortunately it also contained the long-s – why can’t OCR do this now? – but I could cope with that.  The text has a small amount of abbreviation, but probably not more than I could handle.

That’s a whole lot better to work with.  It did take a little while to OCR and create a basic text of De beatitudine animae.  I then started to compare it to the Piscator edition.  Immediately I saw that the text in Menchusius is divided into 7 chapters, with six unnumbered headings, while Piscator is divided rather confusingly into four.  The manuscripts accessible to me do not seem to have any system of divisions.

The Word document that I now have probably contains some OCR errors, and a few places where I have expanded the abbreviations wrongly or whatever.  So the next stage is to go through it. A spell-check seems indicated, for one thing.  We’ll see!