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Searching for BHL 6173 and 6175 (part 3) – Honorius of Augustodunensis

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In my first post, I started searching online for a manuscript copy of BHL 6173, a miracle story about St Nicholas, in order to locate a copy of the text.  I continued with this post, looking at two Austrian manuscripts.  But then a kind commenter “Diego” here drew my attention to the Speculum Ecclesiae, or Mirror of the Church, by 12th century author Honorius of Augustodunensis, in the early 12th century.  It’s worth looking a bit further, although this author is definitely too late for this blog.

This work is a collection of sermons, composed in England at Canterbury, for feast days in the medieval church year.  Apparently it was rather successful, and a considerable number of manuscripts are known, including this list at Mirabile. Here, for instance, is a Canterbury manuscript now in the Parker Library.  Material from it was also excerpted freely, and also translated into the vernacular.  A number of the sermons have been translated at this blog.  A bibliography is here.

It was printed for the first time by Jean Dietemberg at Cologne in 1531.[1]  On folio 208v of this edition here we find his sermon for St Nicholas’ Day (December 6); the “sermo de S. Nicolao”. Migne states that another edition appeared in 1544 at Basle, edited by Olearius who was unaware of the Cologne edition.  However I cannot find any such publication, unless it is this, which does not contain the Speculum.  Migne printed the text from a manuscript – apparently a Rhenoviensis 138 – in the Patrologia Latina 172, cols. 807-1107 (Speculum online here), with our sermo on col.1033.  Migne certainly does not reprint the 1531 edition, as is obvious on fol. 210.  I could find no sign of a modern edition of the text.

This sermon consists of a summary of legends of St Nicholas.  And there, in the middle, we find BHL 6173; and immediately following it BHL 6175.  These two pieces, listed by the Bollandists, are just extracts from Honorius’ sermon.  They seem to have circulated separately, and this is why they have individual BHL numbers.  But they really have no separate existence.

BHL 6173 has the incipit, “Quidam praepotens vir, accersito aurifice…”.  BHL 6175: “Quidam locuples mercator…”.  In Analecta Bollandiana 17, p.209, there is a list of the contents of the big, late-medieval legendaries – books of the legends of the saints – in Austria.  Here BHL 6173 is given the title “The miracle of the vase of gold” while BHL 6175 is “St Nicholas invoked as a guarantor”.

This seems to make clear what our pieces are.  Honorius abbreviated legends already in circulation for his sermo; and excerpts from his sermo then turn up in legendaries.

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  1. [1]Migne, PL, col.15-16.↩

Getting a manuscript offline from the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Gotha collection of manuscripts is less well-known than it should be, except to specialists.  But anybody doing anything with English and Cornish and Welsh saints’ lives is aware of a semi-mythical manuscript in that collection, with the shelfmark “Gotha Forschungsbibliothek Membr. I 81”.  These lives are mainly accessed in an abbreviated recension made by John of Tynemouth and printed as “Nova Legenda Anglie”.  What makes the Gotha manuscript special is that it contains unabbreviated versions of some of this same material.

We live in a period of transition, where archives know that manuscript material ought to be accessible online.  But at the moment most archives have limited IT resources, both of infrastructure and people skills.  It’s important for extremely online people to remember this.  There may well be just one person at the other end.

A lot of Gotha manuscripts are online.  Unfortunately the website was clearly designed by a non-manuscript person – not at all uncommon, this! -, and it makes it hard to find what is online.  You can’t search by shelfmark.  If they would just put up a single page with all the manuscripts on, listed by shelfmark, and with a link to each ms, that would solve it.

Last Tuesday, a mere 6 days ago, I decided to write to the library and ask.  From the list of contacts I selected a certain Dr Henrikje Carius, and enquired.  I didn’t get a reply, but the following day I had an email instead from Dr Monika Müller:

Memb. I 81 has been digitized, however, the digital copy has not yet been put online due to the lack of a sufficient catalogue entry. It is provided to put the digital copy online in a project planned for next year. In general, the Research library sells already existing digital scans which not are accessible online for 8 Euro. Please, inform me about how you would like to proceed.

Here we see evidence of a library that is in the transitional period; because it’s hard to see why you would do all the hard work of photography and then not put it on the web, just because of cataloguing.  That’s an old trap that librarians sometimes fall into, because cataloguing is never finished.  All the same this was a very helpful reply.  But clearly we were going to get a version of the old-fashioned labour-intensive manual process that used to happen.

I was wary of the 8 euro charge, trivial as it was.  Accounting for money takes loads of manual labour, more than such a charge would justify.  Anyway I agreed to it, mainly out of curiosity.  The next step was that I was sent a long form in PDF format which was an “estimate”, and asked to complete it.  But also:

My apologies, that I have overlooked one aspect: As the manuscript has 230 folios and therefore the scan 460 images, it takes a lot of time to upload the scan. The library charges fees for this service, i.e. 25 Euro for the scans of Memb. I 81.

I didn’t know it then, but the zip file in question was 10Gb, so it did take a while.  I don’t think I’ve ever been charged for this before, however.  On the other hand, it was not so long ago that a CD would be sent out by post.

The paperwork duly caused problems.  Thankfully this was emailed to me – once, this would have been by post.  That is a step forward.  Unfortunately I was away from home and reading the PDF form on a phone.  I could see no way to enter text.  Emails to and fro.  When I returned home, two days later, I found that the PDF was indeed read-only!   So I printed it off, hand-scribbled my agreement, and scanned it back in and sent it in.  I would guess that I should have been sent a Word .docx file instead.  All transitional stuff.  They need a form online that you can enter the data into.

Once  I had emailed the PDF in then things moved swiftly.  Another document in PDF appeared, which luckily I did not have to do anything with.  Then I had to find out just how to send money.  International bank transfer was the sole option.  This is common in the EU, but rarely done outside.  Banks tend to charge 10 euros just for the trouble.  But I was fortunate: since the last time I did this, the banks have introduced ways to do it, and the money went over swiftly.  This morning I received a link to the download – the monster 10 Gb file!  This I shall stash on 3 external drives.

Inside the zip were all the pages in TIFF format, each about 30 mb.  I was relieved to find that they were all excellent quality colour photographs.  I opened one in MS Paint and saved it as PNG, and the size dropped to 20mb.  I then saved it as JPG and the size dropped to… 3mb.  That’s about the size I would expect.

What I want, of course, is a PDF.  I have the tools to create it, and then I can add bookmarks for the various sections of the manuscript.  So the PDF needs to be a reasonable size.

There are about 460 images in the folder, so I’m not doing that conversion manually.  Instead I used ImageMagick.  Looking at my collection of installers, I’ve not done this since about 2011!  But it all worked fine.  I right-clicked on the folder and opened it in Terminal, and then ran:

mogrify -format jpeg *.tif

This ran extremely fast and, in less than a minute, it had merrily converted every .tif image into a brand new .jpeg file in the same directory.  Whatever the image conversion defaults were – some loss of quality, of course -, the jpg file size was 3mb each time, and the images looked just as readable for my purposes.  I then fired up Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 – very elderly now, but still working – and combined all the .jpgs (ignoring endleaves etc) into a PDF.  This itself is a mighty 1.18 Gb, but it will serve my purposes very well.

The next step is to use an online set of contents, and create bookmarks.

Thank you, Dr Müller, and the Forschungsbibliothek staff, for what was a far more efficient process than in the past.

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Searching for BHL 6173 (part 2)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In my last post, I started searching online for a manuscript copy of BHL 6173, a miracle story about St Nicholas, which has never been printed.  Two French manuscripts were supposed to contain a copy; neither did.  But two Austrian manuscripts were also listed by the Bollandists in their BHLms database:

  • Heiligenkreuz SB 14
  • Melk SB C.12

Both of these abbeys are in Austria.  This has a union site, which is a good idea.  All the fully digitised manuscripts they have can be located here, and then you drill down.  So far, so good.

There are 93 fully digitised mss of Melk online!  That’s great news.  I find that “C 12” is the old shelfmark – the site in fact lists a concordance of Melk shelfmarks here, but it is useless unless you know which catalogue your source was working from – unlikely with an old reference.  But it’s a fine idea in principle.

In fact “Melk C 12” is now Melk 546, online here.  It’s a 15th century manuscript, so very late.  But we don’t care about that.

Unfortunately the manuscripta.at site has been changed since I last looked at it.  It was frankly rather clunky, but it was entirely usable.  It is now rather quicker to find the actual digitised manuscript.  But otherwise the changes are a disaster.  No researcher can work with this.  Negative changes include:

  • Disabled downloads – at least for the public – and instead tried to force you to use their online browser.
  • Set up that browser menu so that Google Translate can’t translate their pop-up menus.  Non-German speakers are not welcome.
  • Made sure the menu options cannot even be copied, in case you tried to use Google Translate that way.
  • Clicking on “fol. 40 r” instead displays f.36r.
  • There’s no way to download the page that I want.  Links point to the wrong pages.

Somebody has really set out to make the researcher’s job impossible.  There are good, solid reasons why researchers hate librarians. Stuff like this, that makes your life harder, is the reason why.  This has cost me an hour of pain, and in reality the manuscript will now be omitted from my list of witnesses.

The only part of all this that is actually an improvement is that the “Scroll” option in the browser – which, weirdly, is horizontal – is quick.  You can skim through the pages.  On fol. 40r I do find “Quidam praepotens vir“.  Not that I can download the page, of course.

Luckily for me the amount of text that I want is small, and can be screen grabbed.  Here’s the text of BHL 6173.

It’s not hugely readable, to a layman.  I’ll try transcribing it another time.

Blessedly the manuscript also contains BHL 6175, which I am also looking for.  This is only found in the Melk and Heiligenkreuz manuscripts, plus one in Belgium, KBR 07487-07491 (3182), somewhere between fol. 170v-185v, a 13th century manuscript.  But that isn’t online.

What about the Heiligenkreuz 14 manuscript?  Sadly not.  Some of the Heiligenkreuz manuscripts are indeed online, but not this one.  [Update, March 21: Heiligenkreuz 14 is indeed now online].

That’s our four manuscripts, and we have a single hit, which luckily contains both unpublished texts.

But although the Bollandists with their BHL, and BHLms database, are the essential reference, they are not the sole source of all truth.  Google searches can reveal things unknown to the excellent fathers.

Doing so led me to a massive monograph online here at Persee.fr, by Sarah Staats, “Le catalogue médiéval de l’abbaye cistercienne de Clairmarais et les manuscrits conservés” (2016).  And on page 64, we learn of a 12th manuscript, now Saint-Omer 701, which contains part of the Speculum Ecclesiae of Honorius Augustodunensis (who?).  This contains on fol. 121v-122r a “Sermo de sancto Nicolao” (BHL 6173 and 6175).  That manuscript is online and accessible through Mirador.  Here is part of the opening in question! 

Which is a nice bonus.  I think we can get a text together using those two witnesses, don’t you?

Have a good weekend, everyone.

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Searching for BHL 6173

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve gathered nearly 50 miracle stories of St Nicholas, using the wonderful Bibliographica Hagiographica Latina (BHL) index.  BHL 6173 (beginning “Quidam praepotens vir, accersito aurifice…“; “A certain powerful man, an accomplished goldsmith…”) is an epitome of BHL 6172, so the Bollandists did not trouble to print the text.  So I need to look at the manuscripts of BHL 6173.

Fortunately the online database, BHLms, does give four results for this text:

  • Paris BNF lat. 11570
  • Paris BNF lat. 11576
  • Heiligenkreuz SB 14
  • Melk SB C.12

The last two institutions mean nothing to me as yet, but the BNF in Paris has loads of it mss online.  Indeed I already have a download of 11570 in PDF form on my disk.  I quickly acquire 11576.  But… as I look at it, it becomes clear that the entry in BHLms for this manuscript is garbage.  Something has gone wrong, although I have no idea who to report this to.  For this is an unlisted copy of John the Deacon, BHL 6104-8, not BHL 6173.

BNF 11570 lists 4 miracle texts right at the end, on folios 253r-260r.  The last of these is BHL 6173.  But when I look at folio 253r, I find instead a copy of the Transitus of St Nicholas.  It’s supposed to be BHL 6151, “Rursus autem alio tempore altera mulier de vico Neapoleos…”.

Paris BNF lat 11750, fol. 253r.

Instead that text appears under a numeral “II” on the last line of the page.  The “transitus” appears to be a version of BHL 6154.  So the two texts, as listed in BHLms, are reversed.  This is not good news – it means that the catalogue is not reliable.

A casual search reveals that the numerals disappear, and the text becomes continuous.  Thankfully the start of each sentence is capitalised.  At fol. 260r there is nothing starting “Quidam”.  Working back, no sentence starts thus.  The text is simply not there.

The other two institutions are Austrian abbeys.  I can’t recall how to locate these for the moment. I will go off and find out!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

For some months a copy of Charles W. Jones, Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan has sat next to my computer, pestering me to read it.  Today I gave up and fed it to the sheet-feed scanner.  It is no more; just a PDF, floating in the void.  Even as I write, Adobe Acrobat Pro is OCRing it.

I did try.  I really did.  But although the book is full of erudition, it is just so annoying to read.  This is entirely the fault of the author, for departing from normal standards of scholarly writing, and introducing a literary conceit.

Jones pretends that the legend of St Nicholas is like a person, and so his chapters bear annoying and pointless titles such as “Boyhood”, “Maturity”, and so forth.  This neatly conceals the content in a quite amazing way.

But there is worse.  Jones refers to the legend as “N”.  He then writes, in his text, how “N” does this, or that, displays this or that human quality.  It is utterly, utterly wearisome, at least to me, and again obstructs the reader as he tries to work out exactly what is being said.  Jones displays formidable erudition.  But he also displays a tendency to make literary digressions.  Need I add that his footnotes are all banished to an appendix?  And the numbering restarts with each subsection of each chapter?  And that the table of contents does not list those subsections?  To a busy man seeking specific information, such casualness is a burden.

I did try to read through it twice, but gave up.  The last time I did so, I came across a short section which he had translated, so he said, from the Mombritius edition of John the Deacon.  I put a couple of bookmarks in the book, one in the text and one at the back in the notes.  Today I compared that translation with my own text and translation of John.  It was no translation at all, but rather a paraphrase.  No doubt all his translations are the same.  At that point I snapped, and decided that a searchable PDF would be of infinitely more use.  It is gone.

A couple of days ago, a kind correspondent wrote enquiring about the Gotha manuscript I. 81, containing versions of English and Cornish saints’ lives.  This manuscript is described as containing a rather better text than that of John of Tynemouth.  I found a website run by the Gotha collection at Erfurt University.  I was delighted to find that a good solid number of manuscripts were online.  But the website is clearly a first generation effort, constructed by people who never consulted a manuscript in their lives.  It seems to be impossible to find out whether or not a given manuscript is online.

So I wrote and asked if this manuscript was online.  It is not, and not scheduled to go online for a year.  But the photographs already existed; and, for money – seemingly to cover their time – I could have a copy.  I have since been trying to get hold of these.  I get the impression that the library staff are genuinely trying to help.  But the process is much more clunky than it needs to be.  I will probably write something about this, simply as a historical record of what researchers could have to go through in order to access a manuscript, even as late as 2023.

But I am very tolerant of these babysteps by institutions.  The pace of change in their world is breathtaking.  They have limited resources, yet everyone expects everything all at once.  They all have to start somewhere.  Erfurt at least understand that they must move with the times, and are trying.  But the old habits of paperwork die hard!  Still, we have come so far since the days when I was pestering the British Library about these matters.  What I’ve been doing, from a mobile phone, over the last two days, would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just finished translating BHL 6170, a rather pointless miracle story by St Nicholas, published in 1889 by the Bollandists as part of the second volume of their catalogue of the Latin manuscripts of the Royal Belgian Library.  The Bollandists were very busy at the end of the 19th century, and for each manuscript they tended to print first a list of contents, and then, as an appendix to the entry, one or more previously unpublished pieces in it.  This was a very useful habit, which conveniently gives us access to a great deal of hagiographical material.

Completing BHL 6170 means that I have now got a MSWord file with BHL 6130-6170 in it.  Without checking, I presume that’s 40 pieces of text.  The file has the Latin text, then the Google Translate of it, suitably cleaned up by me.  Actually it’s not in one single file yet, but in several, but that’s just a cut and paste job.

I’m toying with just making available what I have, and then doing a “version 2” etc as I add more.  There’s still a fair way to go.  I’m not bothering with the longer texts, but rather the miracle stories.

The reason for doing this job is to make a tool for those working with the manuscripts of the Latin St Nicholas material.  There’s such a lot of it, and so many miracle stories, that you find yourself getting lost while paging through the PDFs.  A file with the Latin text means that you can just type in a few words from the manuscript, press Ctrl-F (find), and discover what on earth you’re looking at.  The translation is relatively easy to produce, and so is worth including.

Next on  my list is BHL 6171, printed by Falconius in 1751 on pp.127-9, “Ex iisdem codicibus membranaceis Vaticanis, num. 1194 & 5696, a pag.15 a tergo, ad 17”, from the same parchment Vatican mss, 1194 and 5696, from p.15 verso to 17.  Ms. Vat. lat. 1194 is not online, annoyingly, but 5696 is.  Let’s hope Falconius didn’t get too creative with the text.

The first task is to OCR that part of Falconius.  I wish Finereader would cope with the long-s better.

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Apollodorus of Damascus (c. 100 AD), “On military engineering”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A tweet by Gareth Harney drew my attention to a collection of ancient works on siegecraft, transmitted together in the Byzantine period, with splendid illustrations.  As with all technical texts, they probably were altered somewhat along the way.

One of these is the Poliorcetica by Apollodorus of Damascus.  He was an important Roman engineer in Trajan’s campaigns in Dacia, and he was responsible for the great bridge over the Danube, as Procopius tells us.  He designed Trajan’s forum, and may be responsible for Trajan’s column and the Pantheon.  But Cassius Dio (69.4, online here) tells us that he was a practical, plain-spoken man; and that Hadrian first demoted and then executed him:

But he first banished and later put to death Apollodorus, the architect, who had built the various creations of Trajan in Rome — the forum, the odeum and the gymnasium. 2. The reason assigned was that he had been guilty of some misdemeanour; but the true reason was that once when Trajan was consulting him on some point about the buildings he had said to Hadrian, who had interrupted with some remark: “Be off, and draw your gourds. You don’t understand any of these matters.” (It chanced that Hadrian at the time was pluming himself upon some such drawing.)

3. When he became emperor, therefore, he remembered this slight and would not endure the man’s freedom of speech. He sent him the plan of the temple of Venus and Roma by way of showing him that a great work could be accomplished without his aid, and asked Apollodorus whether the proposed structure was satisfactory.

4. The architect in his reply stated, first, in regard to the temple, that it ought to have been built on high ground and that the earth should have been excavated beneath it, so that it might have stood out more conspicuously on the Sacred Way from its higher position, and might also have accommodated the machines in its basement, so that they could be put together unobserved and brought into the theatre without anyone’s being aware of them beforehand. Secondly, in regard to the statues, he said that they had been made too tall for the height of the cella. 5. “For now,” he said, “if the goddesses wish to get up and go out, they will be unable to do so.”

When he wrote this so bluntly to Hadrian, the emperor was both vexed and exceedingly grieved because he had fallen into a mistake that could not be righted, and he restrained neither his anger nor his grief, but slew the man.

The introductory letter of the Poliorceta is ascribed to Hadrian in the Bologne manuscript, but Whitehead has argued that the work was in fact dedicated to Trajan.

Here is a sample page from the work, depicting a seige tower.  It is taken (via Wikimedia) from MS. Paris BNF 2442 (siglum P), fol. 97v.

MS Paris BNF 2242, fol. 97v. Via Wikimedia

I thought a little bibliography might be helpful, as it look a little searching to find the basic stuff, like editions and translations.

The principal manuscripts (from Wescher) seem to be:

  • M = Paris BNF suppl. gr. 607 (10th c.), f.33r-45v, 59r-61v.  Catalogue.  Digitised Manuscript.  This manuscript originated at the monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos, and was brought to Europe by Minas Minoides in 1843.  The opening with the incipit is lost.
  • V = Vatican gr. 1164 (11th c.), folios 119r-136v; but the ms has been refoliated and so actually starts on f.118r.  Digitised Manuscript.
  • P = Paris BNF gr. 2442 (11th c.).  Curiously this does not seem to be online, nor any of the dozen copies of it.

Wescher states (p.137) that the fragment in the 16th century Bologne manuscript (“cod. graec. S. Salvatoris 587”), copied by Valerianus Albinus, apparently attributes the work to Hadrian.

The editions of the Greek text known to me are:

  • C. Wescher, Poliorcetique des Grecs: traités théoriques – récits historiques, Imprimerie impériale(1867).  This analyses the manuscripts.  Online here.  This seems to be the first critical edition, although the drawings of the images are curiously bad sometimes.
  • R. Schneider, Griechische Poliorketiker, t. I [Abhandl. der königlichen Gesellschaft der Wiss. zu Göttingen, philol.-hist. Klasse, n. s., 10, 1], Berlin (1908), pp. 8-50, l. 12, et pl. I-XIV).  No analysis of the manuscript tradition, but a German translation, and plates.  Online here (but only in the USA, thanks to predatory German publishers).

There are at least three translations:

  • David Whitehead, Apollodorus Mechanicus, Siege-matters (2010).  This I have not seen.
  • E. Lacoste, “Les Poliorcetiques d’ Apollodore de Damas composées pour l’Empereur Hadrien,” Revue des Études Grecs 3 (1890) 230-81.  Online at Persee here.
  • Schneider’s edition contains a facing German translation.

There is a very good article on the work:

  • P.H. Blyth, “Apollodorus of Damascus and the Poliorcetica”, GRBS 33 (1992), p.127 f..  Online here.

I thought it might be interesting to look at the opening portion of the text, in the Vatican gr. 1164, and in Wescher’s edition.  I had to look several times to be sure that this was the same text!

Vat. gr. 1164, fol. 118r. Beginning of Apollodorus, Poliorcetica.

And now Weschler:

Interesting to see Hadrian, or perhaps Trajan, addressed as “despota”!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been away for a week.  I took a laptop, but blessedly never touched it.  Remarkably I had excellent weather nearly the whole time. Sightseeing, beaches, trips over the moors: all very different.  Even the 270 mile drives each way were not that great a problem.  Naturally I return to quite an inbox, but I think that I have replied to everyone.  I won’t do anything much more until next week, I think.

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A letter by the gnostic Valentinus preserved among the letters of Basil of Caesarea?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have received an email from Nathan Porter, who has an article due out in Vigiliae Christianae, “A Newly Identified Letter of Valentinus on Jesus’s Digestive System: Ps.-Basil of Caesarea’s ep. 366”.  Thankfully the article is available at Academia.edu here.

It seems that Basil of Caesarea’s Epistula 366 (De continentia) is verbally identical, in places, with portions of Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis 3.7.59.3.  The latter contains a quotation from a lost letter of the gnostic heresiarch Valentinus to Agathopous.  This the author gives as:

Valentinus, in his letter to Agathopous, says, “Enduring everything, he was continent. Jesus worked divinity: he ate and drank in his own way, not expelling his food. For so great was the power of continence in him that his food did not corrupt in him, since he himself could not be corrupted.”

The Basil passage is:

For if death comes from corruption, and immortality comes from the absence of corruption, Jesus worked divinity, not mortality. He ate and drank in his own way, not expelling his food. So great a power was continence in him that his food did not corrupt in him, since he himself could not be corrupted.

The author suggests that De Continentia is in fact the very same as the lost letter of Valentinus.  The actual idea is indeed heretical, in a docetic way, because such a Christ is not fully man.

The article is very detailed, very well argued, and certainly deserves publication, and professional responses.   I can only give a hasty comment here on a couple of points.

My only concern is that the type of argumentation employed can produce false positives rather easily.  Two passages of text, of any real length, which appear in different works by different authors but which are worded identically, cannot possibly be independent.  We may not know what the connection is, but there must be a connection somehow.  In this case we are not dealing with a long passage of identical wording.  Instead we are dealing with a few words and an idea in a couple of sentences.  That’s risky territory. We’re all accustomed to parallelomania, where a “parallel” proves connection, indeed derivation, and any two things can be made to look the same if we squint hard enough.  We have no “control” search, in which we check whether the method produces demonstrably false results (or does not).  How indeed would we construct one?  But I recall an example, in a different context, of just such a failure which I discussed here.   The false positive is always a risk, with such small amounts of data.

To his credit, the author seems to be aware of this, and quite rightly tries to address this using other material from the two texts, arguing that it is unlikely that the relatively well-structured argument of De Continentia is produced by reading Clement’s Stromateis and reorganising it.  He makes a good case for this; but I do wonder whether it’s true.

Mr Porter also seems aware of the context in Basil’s writings, and he discusses how De Continentia would fit into the patristic world for which it was written.  This is well done indeed.  However I don’t think that there is any need to suppose that someone intended to transmit a letter of Valentinus to the future by hiding it under Basil’s name, as we know that the Apollinarists were forced to do.  No gnostic felt bound by the teachings of his master, and the disciples of Valentinus each embroidered their own system.  By the fourth century AD, did the name of Valentinus mean much, even to the remaining Valentinians?  In manuscript collections of material, chance plays a large part.  Possibly somebody just liked the line of argument, oblivious of its origin, or it was scholia in the margin, or whatever.

All the same, it’s a fine article.  Worth a read!

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The fragrant underwear of St Nicholas

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The medieval miracle stories of St Nicholas are unsophisticated.  One of these, BHL 6168, contains the following episode, which provoked a few unintentional chuckles.

…the blessed and chosen archbishop of our Lord Jesus Christ, Nicholas, when he was about to pass away from this light to the Lord in a wonderful way, and had completed a wonderful life, he gave back his soul to his most holy creator by an evident miracle. …. Then, having washed the most holy body of a holy man according to the custom, they [the clergy] strove reverently to preserve the linens [linteamina] which the living man had used, as being of use to many in posterity.

2.  Now there happened to be a certain man, Jethro by name, who had come from a far country to consult the holy and most wise man. Here, when he found deceased the man whom he had been looking for alive, he began with great sorrow to beg the same priests and clerics, that even something of the holy man’s clothes [vestimentis] might be given to him out of compassion. …

Then the priests and the clerics, considering these things, and valuing such a request and the longing of the man, gave him one of the linens of the most holy man. Then, when Jethro had received the garment of the blessed Nicholas, with great longing he put it back in a new bag, which had not previously been used by anyone for any actual purpose.

I recall that in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, he remarks Johnson admitted that he had “no passion” for clean linen; that is, clean underwear.    Just which “linen” did Jethro receive, one wonders?

It is worrying that there is no mention of washing the clothing.

And he went away happily saying: “I thank you, Lord, because I am carrying the relics of your most holy confessor.” I beseech you, Lord, to give me a son from my loins through these relics of the blessed Nicholas, for your honor and my joy, and public satisfaction.”

3.   Now when Jethro returned to his city, which is called Excoranda, …. he began to build a church, outside the gates of the city on the east side about two stadia away. As soon as this had been completed, Apollonius, the bishop of the same city, dedicated it in honour and memory of St. Nicholas, storing in it that clothing with solemn veneration.

That is, Jethro wisely placed the church, and the reliquary containing the holy underwear, a good couple of furlongs down wind.  For, as we read:

But when the relics of the holy man were placed in a suitable place, they began to emit such a smell [tantum odorem] from themselves that the fragrance [fragrantia] of such an over-strong smell [odoris nimii] extended for two full stadia.

Various miracles then took place at the church, restoring sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, etc.  One can only hope that nobody sought a cure for a loss of the sense of smell.  The odour of sanctity, it seems, is strong.  Possibly St Nicholas should have sponsored a soap powder?

To conclude on an even more frivolous note, readers in the United Kingdom may wonder just what brand of underwear was preferred by St Nicholas.  Perhaps he wore “Saint Michael” underwear?

Update (4 Feb 2023): For some real information about the Latin for underwear, rather than my persiflage, please see this excellent post by Michael Gilleland at his blog Laudator Temporum Acti here.

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