A sale at Christies recently would have given you the chance. This 13th century Latin bible, with Jerome’s prologues, sold for $39,000. There were papyri, Syriac mss, fragments of all sorts of things; many of which went for a few thousand dollars. I’m glad I didn’t know about the sale or I might have been tempted to bid! But… whatever would I do with a manuscript, other than gloat over it occasionally?
Category: Manuscripts
CSNTM in Cambridge
Last Friday I met with Jeff Hargis of the Centre for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. The team were staying at Tyndale House in Cambridge. Sadly I didn’t get the chance to meet Daniel B. Wallace, the director.
Jeff showed me the photographing setup that they were using. The camera was a very expensive digital SLR, a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III. This has a 21megapixel chip, and costs around $10,000.
The camera was on a tripod on the end of a horizontal pole, lens pointing down towards the book which was resting on the usual book rest. The tripod which had little spirit levels inside it to ensure that the camera was level in at least one direction. Since the pages of the book are at an angle sloping to the spine, this isn’t the end of the story, tho. A large black bag full of books was tied onto the other end of the horizontal pole; this was merely a simple counterweight to stop the camera pulling the tripod over!
On the same desk was a laptop — a MacBook, as it happened. This was running a piece of software (I think it was the bundled Digital Photo Professional) which interfaced to the camera through a bit of Canon supplied software. The camera could be controlled totally from the laptop; focusing, F-stops, white balance, etc. Most important was a preview moder, which just kept the lens open so that the team could see what the image would look like and move the book to get it square, etc.
The software also had an automatic white balance feature. They used a standard Kodak colour card, rested it on the page, pointed the camera at it, told the software which little colour square was white, and let it work out the rest.
Adjusting the book for each shot was a manual process, and needed two people; one to operate the laptop/camera, and one to adjust the book after each page was turned. They tended to photograph all the rectos, then all the versos, as I have done, and so had the same problem that I’ve encountered where the room light changes during the process, making the alternate final images different shades. They rechecked alignment etc after each shot, and usually would make a small manual adjustment. This meant that they spent rather longer on each manuscript than I ever have. The software gave them some grids on the screen to help with alignment, however.
They were not using a lighting rig, but relied on available light and the facilities of the camera to adjust the image. This was mainly because most of the libraries in which they photographed forced them to do this. Artificial light was preferred, simply because it didn’t change while shooting. In extreme cases they had taped black curtains over the window with duct tape to keep the sunlight out.
I wondered what the cost per image was, once all costs were taken into account. Jeff estimated around $3-4 per shot, averaged across the fairly large number of images taken.
The outputs could be pretty large. A TIF file of 60Mb per image, and a derived .JPG. The team give the host institution a stack of DVD’s containing both types of images, as is only fair.
Not all institutions will allow material to go on the web. CSNTM are comfortable with this, and no doubt this will change as libraries get less nervous of the web.
One important consequence of the photographing process is that they perform an inventory of the holdings of the institution. After all, they have to physically put their hands on the manuscripts. Not infrequently this reveals that the inventory is out of date; manuscripts may be there, but not listed. Worse, manuscripts that the host thinks they have may not! This happened in Cambridge, where one of the colleges discovered two manuscripts were missing and could not be found! A determined search over a number of days eventually recovered the two. Thus the CSNTM visit in fact helped ensure that the libraries had what they thought they did.
The process of obtaining access is one in which I was very interested, and I regretted that I could not talk to Dan Wallace, who handles this. Building relationships with people in the Greek Orthodox church, writing letters in the right language every six months, and simply building a reputation are at the bottom of it. I have done some of this myself, and it is tiring and dispiriting work. I can only imagine the efforts that Dan Wallace has put into this.
Over lunch (for which he paid — thank you!) at a pub on the river, Jeff told me about their expeditions. They’ve started to make progress in Cambridge, although as yet the University Library and Trinity College have refused to allow them to photograph their manuscripts. Sadly these institutions would neither allow CSNTM to photograph, nor do it themselves; they would only photograph the mss themselves, and only if paid many times the real cost to do so. To them I say: Gentlemen, that is not what we taxpayers expect of you in return for our money.
But other colleges had been far more sensible. A number of other colleges (I don’t recall which) had been happy to have their NT mss holdings professionally photographed for free, and mss guru Christopher de Hamel lent them parts of his private manuscript collection.
The process of photographing is an iterative one, and no doubt they will be back in Cambridge again. The team were on their way to Oxford when I left, to start the process of building relationships there.
Part of what Dan Wallace does is to do presentations to bodies such as churches in the US to help raise funds. They also produce short films on DVD of their expeditions, and Jeff kindly gave me a copy of their DVD of the Patmos expedition. As yet they have not been able to get onto US TV. But in some ways this process of outreach is a valuable thing. It helps to make the general public aware of the manuscript collections of the world, and their vulnerability, and their value. As such this part of their work benefits every person working with mss.
My thanks to Jeff and Dan and CSNTM for a very interesting and enjoyable visit!
New sermons of Augustine
Back in March at Thoughts on Antiquity I reported on a discovery of 6 sermons of Augustine previously thought lost.
Mike Aquilina at Way of the Fathers draws my attention to an update on this, which indicates that the sermons are authentic.
…in 1974, in France, Johannes Divjak found 29 unpublished letters; in 1990, in Mainz, François Dolbeau discovered 26 sermons. The latter discovery, however, is only a link in the chain of finds in Germany: during the past century about 60 sermons came to light in various German libraries which research has shown to be authentic. …
The parchment manuscript’s 264 pages are no bigger than 115 x 95 millimetres and contain about 60 sermons, most of which are already known. They are sermons by Caesarius and the Pseudo John Chrysostom, written for the Lenten Season and for several celebrations in the month of September, and an extraordinary collection of 28 sermons which can be attributed to Augustine.
Raiding the shelves
It looks as if I may get an unscheduled day in Cambridge tomorrow, courtesy of the Centre for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts team who are there photographing. With luck I’ll get to see what they’re doing and how they do it. As someone who has photographed a few manuscripts in my time, I hope to learn a thing or two.
But I also hope to make a raid on the university library. They must have a copy of the only real publication of Al-Makin, the Historia Saracenica of Erpenius, and it would be interested to see this, and perhaps order a photocopy. I shall have to draw up a list of articles to photocopy, etc.
Perhaps I should try Riedel’s edition of Abu’l Barakat’s catalogue of Arabic Christian literature, since my ILL is taking forever!
Fr. Columba Stewart saves the world (or at least its literature)
PaleoJudaica led me to a rather nice article here on the tireless efforts of the director of the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, Columba Stewart, to photograph manuscripts in dangerous places. Those of us who have been worrying about Ethiopic mss can take comfort that Fr. Columba is on the case. Good for him!
Mss to go online at Manchester
A rather useless story at the BBC News Site. Apparently the John Rylands Library — winner of this month’s Bloodsucker Award — are going to digitise some mss and place them online.
Obviously any digitisation is welcome. But only two cheers, unless they do the lot. I will investigate as more news emerges.
Later: A better story at the Guardian. Apparently they’re not going to do anything readers of this blog will care about; just 40 Middle English manuscripts; stuff like a medieval cookbook. Rats!
The work, which will be carried out using a state-of-the-art high-definition camera, will begin next month and is due to be completed by late 2009.
Jan Wilkinson, the director of the John Rylands library, said: “The library’s Middle English manuscripts are a research resource of immense significance. Yet the manuscripts are inherently fragile, and until now access to them has been restricted by the lack of digital copies. Digitisation will make them available to everyone.
“For the first time it will be possible to compare our manuscripts directly with other versions of the texts in libraries located across the world, opening up opportunities for new areas of research. We hope that this will be the beginning of a wider digitisation programme, which will unlock the tremendous potential of our medieval manuscripts and printed books for the benefit of the academic community and the wider public.”
Well said, Jan. Now if only you’d do something about your greedy photographic department…
Pinakes – Database of Greek Manuscripts online
The IRHT have placed their database of manuscripts of Greek texts online. Named ‘Pinakes’, it can be accessed at:
The interface is a bit unusual. You go to ‘Recherche’, where you are invited to enter the name of the author. You do this in upper case, Latin-type names, with ‘u’ as ‘V’. So EVSEBIVS, not Eusebios. If you give it a chance, as you type you’ll get a list of suggestions appear. You also have to choose from a drop-down list of works.
The database contains 200,000 entries. It’s very minimal; just the library, shelfmark, and maybe folios for each work. But it’s tremendous to have this online!
The IRHT invite comments indicating where it needs to be supplemented. I’ve already seen the Eusebian entries are very incomplete. I might just send in a few!
Manuscript catalogues online at Archive.org
Do a search in Archive.org for “manuscrits” and you will find very quickly catalogues of all the French public libraries, in very many volumes. Repeat the search as “manuscripts” and you will find catalogues of holdings at Cambridge colleges, the Bodleian, Cambridge University Library, and many western and oriental collections. Truly this is a precious resource!
1,000 Arabic Christian Manuscripts destroyed in WW2? Nonsense!
In the preface to volume 2 of the catalogue of the Mingana manuscripts in Birmingham, Alphonse Mingana states (p. v) that the main collections of Arabic Christian manuscripts in the East are the library of Mt. Sinai; the library of the Catholic University of Saint-Joseph in Beirut; the Coptic Patriarchal museum and library in Cairo; and the library of Paul Sbath in Aleppo.
Searching for information on the last, often referenced in Graf’s history of Arabic literature, I found this link to the Schoyen collection. On it, there was this statement: “Paul Sbath had one of the most important collections of Arabic MSS ever formed, ca. 3000 MSS. 2000 MSS are in the Vatican Library, 1000 MSS were destroyed during the war, 2 MSS including the present one came to England.” Yet I find that the HMML expect to photograph some of the Sbath mss in Aleppo.
Fortunately this turns out to be nonsense. An enquiry on the Hugoye list brings the following information:
Sbath’s catalogue of his manuscripts (P. Sbath, Bibliotheque de manuscrits Paul Sbath, pretre syrien d’Alep: catalogue, 3 vols. Cairo, 1928-34) lists 1349 manuscripts.
Of these, nos. 1-338, 340-776 are in the Vatican (I don’t know what happened to no. 339, and I can’t remember now why I know it’s missing).
Most of nos. 777-1349 are in Aleppo, in the possession of Fondation Georges et Mathilde Salem. The manuscripts are (or were in 2001) in their office in Aziziyeh. Some of the manuscripts have gone missing; there are also a number of additional manuscripts not listed in Sbath’s catalogue. I gather from the Internet that a new catalogue of this collection is about to be published: Francisco del Rio Sanchez, Catalogue des manuscrits de la Fondation Georges et Mathilde Salem (Alep, Syrie) (Sprachen und Kulturen des christlichen Orients), Stuttgart: Reichert, 2008. — Hidemi Takahashi.
That’s more likely. I wonder how the mss ended up in the Vatican, tho. Another email from John C. Lamoreaux tells us:
Sbath himself collected around 1300 MSS — though he claimed to have more, perhaps as many as 1500. About half of these ended up in the Vatican Library (fonds Sbath). These are well preserved, and copies are easily had. Apparently, there were legal troubles getting the remaining mss out of Syria. Most of the rest of the mss, but not all, passed to his brother, and are now in the Foundation Sbath, near the Jesuit Residence in Aleppo. Hill is now said to be digitizing the mss remaining in Aleppo. For a list of the mss still in Aleppo, see the entry on the foundation in Takahashi’s bibliography on Barhebraeus (2005).
Sbath also published in the 1930s a three-volume catalogue of mss in private holdings, mostly in Aleppo. It lists about 3000 mss, most otherwise unknown. To my knowledge, none of these mss has yet to be found. I am about finished with an article arguing that Sbath was being less than honest, that he never actually saw many of these mss.
This all makes sense and gives us a little more.
Errors in the transmission of the Koran
The following article from Almasry Alyoum sheds an interesting light on claims that manuscripts of the Koran are without error.
Koran Copies Full of Mistakes on the Markets
By Ahmed el-Beheiri 12/8/2008Several flawed copies of the Koran are put on sale from time to time and several of these copies have recently appeared on the markets. Some suras (chapters) are completely missing, while some have been completed with others.
This is described as a great negligence on the part of publishing and distribution houses in dealing with the act of pressing and collecting the verses of the Holy Koran.
Al-Masry al-Youm has obtained one of these copies full of mistakes. It was published by a publishing and distribution house (“Al-Misriya lil Nashr wa al-Tawzie”) that had been authorized by the Islamic Research Academy to print and distribute 40,000 copies.
The copies contain several mistakes in the collection and arrangement of the papers.
Speaking to al-Masry al-Youm, the director of the department in charge of research and composition, Abdel Zaher Abdel Razek, said that the house staff had made mistakes in collecting and arranging the papers of the Koran. As a result, he said, some suras had disappeared while others were completed with others.
He put the blame for the mistakes on the publishing house owner, as the copies were not reviewed once again before being launched on the markets.
“We will have no leniency on the publishing house owner and the others who made the same mistake” he added. “We will send him a strong letter to warn him and call on him to commit to precision and preserve the sacredness of the Holy Koran when printing it, otherwise he will lose his license to print it”.