Category: Announcements

General announcements

The Law Society and the Mendham collection – will no-one rid us of these turbulent …, erm, “books”?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Many years ago I tried to consult a collection of rare books, owned by the Law Society of Great Britain, and known as the Mendham collection after the clergyman who assembled it and donated it to the society.  The bequest obliged the society to preserve it whole for perpetuity.  I failed to gain access.  Indeed my experience was a negative one.

Last year the society — the trade union of some of the wealthiest professionals in the country — tried to flog off 300 of the best volumes, in blatant contradiction of the terms of the bequest.  Some illiterate office manager, evidently felt his bonus would be safe if he could dispose of them.  Fortunately the outcry was so great that the lawyers backed off.

I learn today that they are at it again.  I received the following missive via the ABTAPL list:

There are renewed concerns about the long-term future of the Mendham Collection, formed by Rev Joseph Mendham (1769-1856), and a rich source of literature on evangelical Protestantism, Catholicism, and anti-Catholicism. The books include 77 incunables and 775 works published in the sixteenth century.

The collection was gifted to the Law Society in 1869 with the express wish by Mendham’s widow that it should be kept together. It has been on deposit since 1984 at Canterbury Cathedral under an agreement between the Society and the University of Kent and the Cathedral. The current agreement expires on 31 December 2013.

Thanks to a British Library grant to the Cathedral in the late 1980s, a full printed scholarly catalogue of the collection was published in 1994. A condition of the British Library’s grant was that the collection should not subsequently be dispersed.

In July last year a major public row erupted when the Law Society creamed off, and physically removed from the Cathedral, some 300 choice volumes, with a view to sending them to auction at Sotheby’s in the autumn. As a result of an online petition, negative media coverage, and private lobbying (including by the Religious Archives Group), the Law Society backed off.

Discussions have since taken place between the University of Kent and the Law Society with a view to the collection being acquired by the University and the Cathedral and remaining at Canterbury. These discussions have followed a dual track, one of which has been a without prejudice offer to purchase the collection. It is understood that this offer remains on the table but is currently not accepted by the Law Society.

In late January this year the Law Society wrote to the vice-chancellors of an unknown number of UK universities, reaffirming its intention to sell the Mendham Collection, and inviting bids to purchase the entire collection. Expressions of interest are sought by 24 February 2013 and firm proposals by 17 March 2013.

In addition to extensive and important holdings of antiquarian books, the collection still contains 12 manuscripts. However, the group of Italian and Spanish manuscripts was gifted to the Bodleian Library (where they remain) shortly after Mendham’s death, and in accordance with his wishes.

Dr Clive D Field, OBE
email: c.d.field@bham.ac.uk<mailto:c.d.field@bham.ac.uk>
webpage: http://clivedfield.wordpress.com/

Why don’t they just donate the books?  They certainly can afford to.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what corruption and neglect look like.  In 50 years things like this will be quoted as examples of the decadence of our days.

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How old are the Wikipedia administrators?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An interesting article at Wikipediocracy makes some interesting points:

Who writes Wikipedia? … In a recent op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times, Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner proudly highlighted the fact that the Wikimedia community includes many very young contributors:

The youngest Wikipedian I’ve met was 7 … There’s a recurring motif inside Wikipedia of preteen editors who’ve spent their lives so far having their opinions and ideas discounted because of their age, but who have nonetheless worked their way into positions of real authority on Wikipedia. They love Wikipedia fiercely because it’s a meritocracy: the only place in their lives where their age doesn’t matter.

In fact, many Wikipedia administrators are school-going teenagers. The youngest I personally am aware of was 11 years old when he won administrator rights; at 12, he became a bureaucrat, which means he had the ability to close requests for adminship and appoint other editors as administrators.

Wikipedia has a well publicised shortageof contributors.

Minors have time to edit. They do not have jobs, families and children to worry about.

However, while the experience Gardner describes may be a very validating and confidence-building one to the child or teenager in question, it does not necessarily make for mature decision-making, nor is it likely to attract the most capable writers. A veteran Wikimedian with more than 200,000 contributions to Wikimedia projects recently expressed the following sentiments, illustrating the resulting tensions within the community:

Under the current system, any little ignoramus who has chatted on IRC for ten days can amass enough support to become an admin, and attack long-standing editors of the highest calibre, driving them away from Wikipedia. That these people (who universities would fight to employ) are treated with such disdain by a pack of semiliterate high school kids is depressing, because it spells the writing on the wall for Wikipedia. As a result, the vast majority of currently active sysops appear to be teens who, judging by their lack of interest in contributing content, fail at school and can’t do Pythagoras theorem. Some seem to hate learning and hate knowledge. They spend most of their time chatting on IRC making infrequent appearances on Wikipedia only when rallied by other IRC admins to add their voices to a chorus of support. Hence my contempt for the Wikipedia officialdom.

Regular readers may recall the incident where the academic authors of the Acta Pauli blog were harassed by an administrator whom they discovered was 14 years old.

Another interesting statistic is how many active editors there are in Wikipedia.  The answer, curiously, is only about 3,000 as of December 2012.  This statistic defines “active” as making more than 100 edits a month, or 4 a day; not hard to exceed, as any Wikipedian will know.

It is impossible to say whether any of this will affect the rise and progress of Wikipedia as the main online reference source used by hundreds of millions.  Probably it will not, at least until an alternative is available.  But it does highlight on what a fragile base this information source rests; child-administrators and a small hard core of dedicated, but not very educated, people.

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Vatican manuscripts online!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Mike Aquilina of Way of the Fathers has drawn my attention to a Vatican Radio announcement: 256 Vatican manuscripts have gone online.  A list by shelfmark is here.  They are mostly from the Palatine collection, which in turn contains a lot of the loot from the ancient monastery of Lorsch, destroyed during the 30 years war.

Here are a few highlights:

  • Pal. lat. 2 – Old Testament, Lorsch, 9th c.  (followed by a considerable number of biblical mss.; as far as Pal. lat. 68)
  • Pal. lat. 57 – The catalogue of the library at Lorsch.  Yay!  I have so wanted to see this.
  • Pal. lat. 150 – Ignatius, Polycarp, Hermas; plus letters and life of Anthony, and the sayings of Sextus.
  • Pal. lat. 153 – Chrysostom on Hebrews.
  • Pal. lat. 162 – Lactantius; and Claudian.
  • Pal. lat. 170 – ps.Hegesippus.

There’s then a lot of Jerome and Augustine.  Then:

All this on a fairly quick glance plus some random clicking.  It is an excellent selection.

The index pages for some of the manuscripts need more information.  But this is a minor point.  A PDF download would also be nice to have.

I hope that someone will do a proper list of all the mss. and their contents.  I would do it, but I am still somewhat unwell.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve never actually owned a printed copy of Manfred Clauss’ The Roman cult of Mithras, which is the standard introduction to the subject.  I’ve made photocopies of bits of it.  Latterly I found online somewhere a PDF of the whole thing.  But I’ve never had a copy.

Well, last week I cracked and bought one.  It arrived today, and I have started to read it.  It is, really, truly, super.  In fact you get far more from it in printed form, than in PDF.  Just skipping through the pages looking for tidbits is not nearly the same.  So … I am enjoying it.  Even if the publisher printed the cover photograph back to front!

A couple of ILL’s have arrived at the library, including one on the Mithraeum at Dieburg and one on marginalia in Greek papyri.  I shall have some nice things to read next week!

I’ve been quite ill for the last month, and I only went back to work last week.  I was still quite shaky, and went back very hesitantly and carefully, and only because I don’t get paid sitting at home.  I just about survived, but had to leave my laptop at home and rest every evening.  Expect light blogging until I get rather better.

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Mali and the politics of spite

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The events at Timbuktoo have been on my mind in the last week, and probably those of anyone interested in manuscripts.

As we all now know, the colonial territory now called Mali is divided on race lines between Arabs in the north, plus some Touareg in the desert, and negros in the south.  When the Americans forced the colonial power to withdraw, power was handed over to the leaders of the black south, who have behaved in the manner that everyone other than the Americans predicted.  So far, so tediously 20th century.  It seems likely that various no-goods, vagabonds and ruffians in the north acquired heavy arms during the recent revolution in Libya, and set out southwards to grab what they could.   They quickly found that the civilised “army” in Mali was no more than a bunch of political musclemen, cruel, but weak, cowardly and ill-disciplined.  The “army” promptly ran away.  All this, by the way, could be a description of the events in the Sudan at the time of the Mahdi.  The desert folk seized control of the towns on the southern edge of the desert, including Timbuktoo.  Lacking any motive but Islam, they amused themselves by imposing it on the inhabitants.  They also moved into the new library building which they treated as sleeping accomodation.  These were not, evidently, a national movement.  They were a bunch of bandits and nothing more.

When this ragtag band of “Islamists” threatened to take over the whole country, the colonial power, France, despatched a few hundred soldiers and some aircraft, and the desert vagabonds promptly ran away and hid in the hills.  On their way out of Timbuktoo, they are said to have set fire to the library, presumably out of spite.

At the moment it sounds as if the majority of the manuscripts are safe, because they were taken elsewhere in the town.  All this highlights the dangers of “preservation”, by placing valuable material in a central location in a third-world state.  I do wish that people would stop doing this, for it always leads to trouble.

It highlights the need, far more urgent than building libraries, for a photographic record of all the documents.

The other point to highlight is one for those of us who try to educate, to help, to make things better in this world.  It is very simple, but we tend to forget it, in our benevolence.  It is this:

Some people don’t give a s***.

It is worth remembering.  The bandits knew and cared nothing about Timbuktoo and its heritage.  Even though, primarily, it was culturally their heritage. That heritage to them was of no more importance than a nice new building to sleep in; and something to burn, out of spite, towards others.  It mattered less than an old rug on their camel.

The same attitude may be found everywhere, including in the western world.  We need to remember that, just because what we are doing is obviously valuable, it does not mean that some scumbag will not set out to wreck it.  Just because he can.

The presence of real evil in mankind is something that it is easy for us to forget, in our genial, ivory towers.  We must not.  Against such evil-doers we need to use force; for they respect nothing else.  This is why we need policemen.  This is why, sometimes, we need bullets, and we need to use them.

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Piecing together Diogenes of Oinoanda

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A new blog from the author of Antiochepedia:

Diogenes was an Epicurean Greek from the 2nd century AD who carved a summary of the philosophy of Epicurus onto a portico wall in the ancient city of Oenoanda in Lycia. The surviving fragments of the wall, which originally extended about 80 meters, 25,000 words long and filled 260 square meters of wall space. Less than a third of it has been recovered.

It sounds like a useful project:

The purpose of this blog is to gather together the disparate representations on the great inscription at Oinoanda so it will be accessible to the general public.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve started to look at the material on the earliest Mithraic monuments.  This is frustrating, because of what I know is online and cannot see!  Thus I cannot see pp.34-35 of Beck on Mithraism, even though I know it is online.  If you can, and feel like sending me some screen grabs, I would be grateful.*

Meanwhile my attention has been drawn to the mysterious Kerch plaques, which show a bull-killing but not a familiar one.  This led me to look at the CIMRM.  From this I learn that Derewitzky, Das Museum der Kaiserlich Odessaer Gesellschaft, vol. 2, 1898, contains useful material on p.10 f., and plate V, 1.  Again … I can’t access the dratted thing.  I wonder whether that is because I am in the UK, and so “Outside The Wall of Knowledge”; or whether the book simply isn’t online.  Rats!

Not that I am the only one to have this problem.  Vermaseren himself, in CIMRM 10, describes a report of a find of a Mithraeum at Aitador in the Crimea, and adds:

This sanctuary of the Persian god is said to have been published by Rostovtzeff in IIKA[1] 40, 1911, 1 ff;, but up to now we have not yet succeeded in consulting this article.

I suspect Vermaseren would envy my access to materials online, tho.  A little searching, a bit of Google “did you mean to search for” something incomprehensible in Russian, a list at AWOL, and I find that vol. 40, 1911, here.

Wonder if I can get much out of this, using Google Translate…!

UPDATE: Blasted thing is in DJVU format, and with a website name as “watermark”.  So I can’t export the thing for character recognition.  Let me try printing it – I have the Adobe PDF driver installed and should be able to “print to PDF”.

The table of contents says that the article is about “Thracian gods”.

UPDATE: Sadly the resolution in the DJVU is too low to get any OCR to work.  Rats!

* Got it – thanks!

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  1. [1]=”Izvesti ja imperatorskoi kommissii archeologiceskoi. See also CR Comm. Arch. Petersbourg”, or so Vermaseren says.↩

A truly nasty IE9 bug: “” doesn’t work any more!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I apologise to my non-techie readers.  But this issue cost me a couple of hours of my life, and I can’t find anything about it on the web.  So I feel morally obliged to write something.

Yesterday a kind reader drew my attention to some mysterious behaviour in the new Mithras pages.  Lines that contained a hyperlink were being split.  <div> tags were mysteriously moving to the next column.  Unordered list tags (<ul>) were displaying an extra blank line at the top.

After some debugging, and removing all the styling, I got the code necessary to produce the problem down to a small fragment:

<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>some title</title>
</head>
<body>
<a name="top"/>
<ul>
<li><a href="#second_header">1. second header</a></li>
<li><a href="#third_header">2. third header</a></li>
</ul>
 </body>    
</html>

And this gave the result:

And why, oh why, does this very standard boiler-plate code give an extra “dot” in IE9?  It doesn’t in Chrome or Firefox.

Believe it or not, the answer is the <a name… /> tag, what is called the “destination anchor”.  If you change it thus:

<a name="top"></a>

It all works!  You get what you should get, this:

I am quite frustrated about this.  I mean, did Microsoft actually test IE9 at all?

Once I made this change, all — and I mean all — the weird formatting errors went away.  They had nothing to do with CSS, or <div> tags, or inline-blocks.

HTML has got really very complex these days.  Doing CSS is almost impossible unless you do it all the time; most people just copy and paste bits.  It is all so far away from the days when HTML won acceptance by being easy.

UPDATE: I think that the problem is that IE9 simply supposes that the “<a name=…>” tag has not been ended.  It just ignores the “/>”.  So it carries on, rendering the HTML, until it encounters another anchor tag.  This will most likely be a link: “<a href=…>.  At this point, it throws a paragraph break (why?), resets itself and carries on.  And this is why you get random problems further down in the HTML.

The reason why my ordered list, above, had an extra “dot” is that the entries in the list were hyperlinks.  So IE9 found the start of the first one, went “eek! panic! panic!”, threw a paragraph break (thereby splitting the list into two and creating an empty entry) before gathering itself up and carrying on.  The problem does NOT manifest unless the ordered list contains the links.

For some reason this can also affect DIV’s and IMG tags, but I have not sought to bottom out how and why.

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Finding the limits of the internet

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just added a page to my new Mithras site for CIMRM 1083.  This monument is perhaps the most complicated and well-preserved example of a carving of Mithras killing the bull.  It shows all sorts of events from his (unknown) mythology in side panels.  In other words, it’s a gem.  Vermaseren states that just about every book that ever mentions Mithras includes a photograph of it.  It’s famous.  It’s the classic representation.  It comes from the Nida-Heddernheim Mithraeum no 1, and apparently it’s in a museum in Wiesbaden.

Yet … I have been quite unable to find any photographs of it on the web!  Yes, the internet doesn’t have the classic relief of Mithras doing his Mithras-act.

It is worth reminding ourselves that what is online may be very skewed.  We tend to judge by availability.  Yet here we have an example where the internet is distorting the message, by omitting something really, really important.  It leads to the general question: how is the internet misleading us?

Here’s Vermaseren’s image of it, for your reference:

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The Dura-Europos military calendar (“feriale duranum”)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I wonder how many of us were aware that the excavations at Dura-Europos also included a papyrus with a  military calendar on it?  I certainly never was.  Its shelfmark is PDura 54, and it is held at the Beinecke library in the USA.  As with all papyri there are gaps, of course.  But the item indicates what sort of events were officially marked by a garrison in the third century, in the reign of Alexander Severus (“our lord Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander”).  As such, it gives a glimpse into garrison life.

A transcription of the Latin text is here.  Details and photographs are here.  A translation is online in Google Books preview here.[1]  Since these previews can be a bit transitory, and a lot of people will not click through anyway, I thought that I would reproduce it here.

* * *

Column I

The Kalends of January:…

3 days before the Nones of January: because vows are discharged and announced, and for the safety of our lord Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander Augustus and for the everlasting empire of the Roman people, to Jupiter Optimus Maximus a male ox, to Juno a female ox, to Minerva a female ox, to Jupiter Victor a male ox, … to Father Mars a bull, to Mars Victor a bull, to Victory a female ox …

7 days before the Ides of January: because honourable discharge is granted to those who have served out their time along, with the right of privileges; also because salaries are paid out to the soldiers, to Jupiter Optimus Maximus a male ox, to Juno a female ox, to Minerva a female ox, to Safety a female ox, to Father Mars a bull…

6 days before the Ides of January: for the birthday of the divine empress …, to the divine … public prayer.

… days before the Ides of January: for the birthday of Lucius Seius Caesar, father-in-law of the Augustus, a male ox to the genius of Lucius Seius Caesar, father in-law of the Augustus.

9 days before the Kalends of February: for the birthday of the divine Hadrian, to the divine Hadrian a male ox.

5 days before the Kalends of February: for the Arabian and Adiabenine and most great Parthian victories of the divine Severus and for the start of the reign of the divine Trajan, to Parthian Victory a female ox, to the divine Trajan a male ox.

1 day before the Nones of February: for the start of the reign of the divine Antoninus Magnus …, to the divine Antoninus Magnus a male ox.

The Kalends of March: for the rites of the birthday of Father Mars Victor, a bull to Father Mars Victor.

1 day before the Nones of March: for the start of the reign of the divine Marcus Antoninus and of the divine Lucius Verus, to the divine Marcus a male ox, to the divine Lucius a male ox.

3 days before the Ides of March: because emperor Caesar Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander was acclaimed emperor, to Jupiter a male ox, to Juno a female ox, to Minerva a female ox,… to Mars a male ox; and because emperor Caesar Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander Augustus was first acclaimed emperor by the soldiers …, public prayer.

1 day before the Ides of March: because Alexander, our Augustus, was acclaimed Augustus, pater patriae and pontifex maximus, public prayer; to the genius of our lord Alexander Augustus a bull.

Column II

14 days before the Kalends of April: for the day of the festival of the Quinquatria, public prayer; through to 10 days before the Kalends, the same public prayers.

I day before the Nones of April: for the birthday of the divine Antoninus Magnus, to the divine Antoninus a male ox.

5 days before the Ides of April: for the start of the reign of the divine Pius Severus, to the divine Pius Severus a male ox.

3 days before the Ides of April: for the birthday of the divine Pius Severus, to the divine Pius Severus a male ox.

II days before the Kalends of May: for the birthday of the eternal city of Rome, to the eternal city of Rome a female ox.

6 days before the Kalends of May: for the birthday of the divine Marcus Antoninus, to the divine Marcus Antoninus a male ox.

The Nones of May: for the birthday of the divine Julia Maesa, to the divine Julia Maesa public prayer.

6 days before the Ides of May: for the Rose festival of the standards, public prayer.

4 days before the Ides of May: for the games of Mars, to Father Mars the Avenger a bull.

12 days before the Kalends of June: because the divine Pius Severus was acclaimed emperor by to the divine Pius Severus.

9 days before the Kalends of June: for the birthday of Germanicus Caesar, public prayer to the memory of Germanicus Caesar.

1 day before the Kalends of June: for the Rose festival of the standards, public prayer.

5 days before the Ides of June: for the festival of Vesta, to Mother Vesta public prayer.

6 days before the Kalends of July: because our lord Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander was acclaimed Caesar and donned the toga of manhood, to the genius of Alexander Augustus a bull.

The Kalends of July: because Alexander, our Augustus, was first elected consul, public prayer.

4 days before the Nones of July: for the birthday of the divine Matidia, to the divine Matidia public prayer.

6 days before the Ides of July: for the start of the reign of the divine Antoninus Pius, to the divine Antoninus Pius a male ox.

4 days before the Ides of July: for the birthday of the divine Julius, to the divine Julius a male ox.

10 days before the Kalends of August: for the day of the festival of Neptune, immolatory public prayer.

The Kalends of August: for the birthday of the divine Claudius and the divine Pertinax, to the divine Claudius a male ox, to the divine Pertinax a male ox.

The Nones of August: for the games of Safety, to Safety a female ox. … before the Kalends of September: for the birthday of Mamaea Augusta, mother of our Augustus, to the Juno of Mamaea Augusta … … for…

… before the Kalends of September: for the birthday of the divine Marciana, to the divine Marciana public prayer.

Column III

1 day before the Kalends of September: for the birthday of the divine Commodus, to the divine Commodus a male ox.

7 days before the Ides of September …

14 days before the Kalends of October: for the birthday of the divine Trajan and for the start of the reign of the divine Nerva, to the divine Trajan a male ox, to the divine Nerva a male ox.

13 days before the Kalends of October: for the birthday of the divine Antoninus Pius, to the divine Antoninus Pius a male ox.

… before the Kalends of October: for the birthday of the divine Faustina, to the divine Faustina public prayer.

9 days before the Kalends of October: for the birthday of the divine Augustus, to the divine Augustus a male ox.
[…] of November […]
[…] the Kalends […]

Column IV

16 days before the Kalends of January ……. public prayer; through to

10 days before the Kalends the same …

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  1. [1]Olivier Hekster, Rome and Its Empire: A.D. 193-284, p.127-9.↩