I finished OCRing the Novesianus edition of Ephraem Latinus, De Beatitudine Animae, although with some difficulty. The text grew more and more abbreviated, until on the last page every single word was abbreviated somehow, anyhow. It looks as if the editor/printer had allocated a certain amount of space, and got it wrong. Very odd.
I saw some more marginal notes, and these seem to be corrections, or emendations. The publisher is clearly printing a manuscript, but these are places at which he thinks the text before him is in error.
The text is divided into four chapters, each with a short introduction, just as in the incunable; but the introductory text is not always the same as the incunable.
It seems that there is a 6th century manuscript of this ancient Latin translation of Ephraem, at the Vatican Library, and it is online! I’ve not got my hands on it yet tho.
I don’t feel like doing any text critical stuff at the moment, so I’ve started passing the electronic text into Google Translate and ChatGPT, and working on the output. The text is addressed to monks, and those living a monastic life. The Latin seems fairly simple. It starts with a series of beatitudes, and then moves into exhortations to the brothers.
This little collection (parva corpus) of sermons by “Effrem” seems to have been popular. There were copies in a good many libraries in the Dark Ages.
I confess that I am getting a little fed up of medieval monasticism and hagiography – I would like to return to the hard mediterranean light of antiquity – but I’ll make an English version of this.