I have Gunther Christian Hansen’s evidently excellent new critical text in the Berlin GCS series of Socrates Scholasticus before me. So I have placed online a summary of what he says about the extant manuscripts of that work, plus their translations into Armenian, Syriac, etc. The notes are here.
Cambridge University Library is going to put Codex Bezae online, or so I read in a Daily Telegraph story. Better still, they’re preparing to put all their books online, and make them freely available. That’s what we want to hear.
Anne Jarvis, the university Librarian, said that the exciting new plans would open up priceless collections to students worldwide.
She said: “Our library contains evidence of some of the greatest ideas and discoveries over two millennia.
“We want to make it accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world with an internet connection and a thirst for knowledge.
Good for them! Codex Bezae will be in the first tranche, as — at little pointlessly — will be a Gutenberg bible.
I hope they attract lots of funding. This will be the first UK library to take mass free access seriously, and if they do it, will probably guarantee the existence of the library into the digital age.
Dan Wallace and the chaps at CSNTM who photograph manuscripts of the bible were in Cambridge trying to negotiate access. I suspect their efforts — seemingly fruitless at the time — probably helped change minds and create expectations at CUL.
I’m increasingly impressed with what Anne Jarvis is doing. I’ve just discovered that even people like me — readers not part of the university — can use the library Wifi network if we get a ‘Lapwing ticket’, valid for a limited period. It doesn’t look as if they charge, either, which is as it should be. Lack of access to electronic resources is a real pain for the occasional visitor, and they have addressed it.
I have also received my copy of Croke and Harries, Religious conflict in fourth century Rome, and started to read it. Lots of excellent texts in translation.
But it’s much too sunny today to be sat in doors, so I went off to Norwich today instead.
One of the most important collections of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts – for centuries kept at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge – has been entirely digitised, and is now available on the internet.
The college’s Parker Library holds more than 550 documents – including the 6th Century St Augustine Gospels, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the earliest history written in English.
Sounds exciting, hey?
Well, it isn’t. True, the manuscripts have been photographed. True the images are web-connected. But no, you can’t see them. All you can see is low-resoltution images where the text is too fuzzy to read. All the indexes, list of contents, are all locked.
Why not? Well, just guess. That’s right — money money money. They want to be paid.
Corpus Christi College consumes substantial quantities of public money each year. It is, in theory, a private institution. In practice it is almost entirely reliant on the tax payer. There is something a little distasteful about a body so hugely privileged for centuries, indeed from the time of Henry VIII on, engaged in trying to charge the man in the street for access.
Whether what they are doing is immoral I do not know. But it does compare very unfavourably with Google books, Google streetview, Google mail, with the GPS satellite navigation… the list of US-based generosity could go on indefinitely. If those items had been UK-based, they would all be charging for access.
I don’t want to pillory those involved. But I feel sadness all the same. It feels so small-minded, so ignoble, to prevent the ordinary man from reading the pages. It’s not as if anyone but institutions will ever subscribe anyway.
The gentlemen of Corpus of a previous generation would have considered such money-grabbing ungentlemanly. It is a pity that Corpus today, for whatever reason, does not feel the same.
And what, after all, in these days of devaluation, is 50,000 euros? Not a lot, really; not when you consider that computer programmers working in the City of London can earn 700 euros a day, or around 168,000 euros in a year of 48 weeks. One of our Merchant Banking princes would probably consider it pocket change.
Well! I wish I earned anything like that. I’d find many uses for the money that would benefit us all. So beneficial, indeed, would I be that I wonder why a grateful government has not simply stepped forward and volunteered me the money. It seems inexplicable, really. But that’s one of life’s little mysteries.
Returning to seriousness, tho, it is really very interesting to see what a couple of common 15th century mss are worth on the market. It is far less, in truth, than I had thought. Of course it is quite beyond my means. I suspect that is a good thing. After all, while it is easy to buy such items, how easy is it to get them off the shelf when you are done with them? Never buy a book without knowing how you will get rid of it. Trust me on this.
This project may be achieved over a span of 10 years divided into three phases, with possible intervals between them. In a preliminary phase the involvement of 60 people is planned, including photographers and conservator-verifiers, in the second and third phases at least 120. Before being able to initiate an undertaking of this kind, which is causing some anxiety to those in charge of the library (and not only to them!), naturally it will be necessary to find the funds. Moves have already been made in this direction with some positive results.
German researchers preparing “Qur’an: The Critical Edition”
This is a serious business. A team of researchers at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences is preparing to bring out the first installment of Corpus Coranicum – which purports to be nothing less than the first critically evaluated text of the Qur’an ever to be produced.
What this means is that the research team is in the process of analysing and transcribing some 12,000 slides of Qur’an mansucripts from the first six centuries of the text’s existence. Once that is complete, the way is open to producing a text that annotates and, presumably, provides some sort of exegesis on the differences found in the early manuscripts.
…
The Potsdam-based team of Corpus Coranicum have so far concentrated on Suras 18 to 20, and are due to produce a first slice of the final product from that in the next few weeks. The whole book is meant to take until around 2025.
UPDATE: The English language site seems to be down but the Google cache contains the following, seemingly from an old update:
Welcome to the Corpus Coranicum
The project “Corpus Coranicum” contains two unworked fields of qur’anic studies: (1) the documentation of the qur’anic text in his handwritten as well as orally transmitted form and (2) a comprehensive commentary which elucidates the text within the framework of its historical process of development.
Because of the ambiguity of the early defective writing system of the Qur’anic manuscripts, a strict separation of the data on the one hand provided by manuscripts and on the other hand transmitted via the tradition of recitation is recommended. The documentation of the Qur’anic text will provide a documentation for both traditions and compare them afterwards.
The planned commentary focuses on a historical perspective, the Qur’an seen as a text which evolved through the period of more than twenty years, thereby getting formal and content-related differences through abrogation and re-definitions within the text. Furthermore, the commentary is based on an inclusion of the judeo-christian intertexts and looks at the Qur’an as a document of the Late Antiquity. “Corpus Coranicum” is in the early stage of its development; the first results are planned to be published online in 2009.
That shows a very sensible approach. You eat an elephant a little at a time. Rather than working on a Koran text as such, work on the early witnesses to the text, the physical remains, the unvocalised scripts, and find out what we actually have from that period and what it says.
Juan Garces is inviting suggestions for manuscripts to be digitised here.
The obvious answer to this question is: all of them! We all want access to free digital resources, but creating them is tempered by a series of practical considerations. How can we best deliver digitised manuscripts to your desktops? One answer is to secure funding for independent digitisation projects with achievable goals. Such a series of projects has to be placed squarely within a vision and strategy. At the start of each one we have to ask ourselves: which manuscripts should we digitise next? …
It is, however, crucial that we also engage you. Here’s how. Contact me to answer the following question: which particular Greek manuscripts held by the British Library would you like to see digitised and why? I cannot promise that your favourite manuscript will be in the next phase, but I can assure you that your feedback will inform our decision.
Basically Juan has to go out and bid for money. So if you have an idea for some manageable-size “project” that would attract funding easily, tell him. If you have a bunch of manuscripts in mind, tell him.
I notice that the Stavros Niarchus Foundation is funding the first tranche. We have, perhaps, overlooked the “wealthy Greek shipowner” angle on all this. The manuscripts — the physical books — are the remains of Greek culture as it was in the middle ages, and record that culture from still earlier stages. Why shouldn’t this Greek culture be online?
Over at Juan Garces blog, there are a couple of images of a page from a Syriac treatise by Severus of Antioch, Contra impium grammaticum, (=Against the impious John the Grammarian). The treatise was composed in the early 6th century, and the argument forms part of the political arguments taking place in the Byzantine empire in the guise of religious disagreements.
The image is very nice, and shows a clear and readable Serto hand. What is particularly interesting is that the parchment was itself second-hand when the ms. was written. The previous text had been washed off, but not very well, and it is clearly visible in the areas not written over. The text was a Greek bible in uncial. Juan also shows a UV image which brings up the under-text very clearly. The manuscript itself is one of those acquired in the 1840’s from the abbey of Deir el-Suryani (=monastery of the Syrians) in the Nitrian desert in Egypt.
I don’t know whether this work by Severus has ever been translated into English. It would certainly be nice to have the whole ms. online, tho.
I have been hunting around to see which Greek manuscripts at the British Library it might be interesting to get digitised. It is remarkably difficult to find out.
The BL catalogue is online; but it is largely useless because there is no way to restrict results to Greek mss only. So a search for Chrysostom — every collection must have these — is pointless, because most of the results will be Latin manuscripts of translations. This is really quite frustrating. So far I have managed to find only a handful of mss which I might put forward.
One possible source of information would be Henri Omont, ‘Notes sur les manuscrits grecs du British Museum’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, 45 (1884), 314-50, 584 (p. 335). This is online here. Maybe this will list some interesting volumes, if it ever downloads!
UPDATE: Indeed it does. After a survey of the main collections, it lists the interesting previous owners and what they owned. I need to digest this down into a list of suggestions.
All the NT people are getting excited about Juan Garces’ plan to digitise 250 manuscripts at the British Library. But of course the rest of us have views too! I have written today to Dr Garces asking for some classical manuscripts to be done as well.
Some time ago I went through the introductions of a large number of Loeb editions in order to get an overview of what mss of what existed where. Since the list of mss in a Loeb is always limited, anything mentioned is probably important.
Here’s what I found that was held by the BL — 9 manuscripts in all:
Letters of Alciphron — British Library Harleianus 5566. Paper. ff.141r-167v.
Apollodorus — British Library Harleian 5732. (16th c).
Babrius, Fables — British Library, Additional 22087 (codex Athous). Contains fables 1-122. Corrections in the margins and above the lines by Demetrius Triclinus. 10th c.
Herodotus – British Library 1109 (Greek papyri in the British Museum III p.57 = Milne, Catalogue of the literary papyri in the British Museum no. 102) 1/2nd century
Homer, Iliad, — British Library Burney 86, 11th c.
Isaeus — British Library, Burneianus 95 (=codex Crippsianus). This is a vellum manuscript containing Andocides, Isaeus, Deinarchus, Antiphon, Lycurgus, Gorgias, Alcidamas, Lesbonax and Herodes. This was first discovered in the library of the monastery of Vatopedi on Mt. Athos. It was then acquired by the Phanariot Greek Prince, Alexander Bano Hantzerli of Constantinople. John Marten Cripps bought it from him at the start of the 19th century. It then passed into the collection of Dr. Charles Burney, and thence with the rest of that collection by purchase into the British Museum in 1827. It also has two corrector’s hands. The first is the original scribe correcting his work against the exemplar, with the occasional conjecture. The second may or may not involve the use of a different ms. 13th c.
Isaeus — British Library, Burney 96. 15th c.
Thucydides — British Library 11727. Parchment 11th c.
This taken from my notes about the traditions here:
