Category: miscellaneous news

Medieval manuscripts for sale

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
The Baden state library (Badische Landesbibliothek) in Karlsruhe has a problem.  Some of its manuscripts actually belong to the House of Baden, not the state.  The family is now short of cash — all those redistributive taxes beloved of the political Left, no doubt — and is proposing to sell them off at auction.  An article appeared in the Stuttgarter Zeitung, and posts about this have appeared in the MEDTEXTL, and MEDIAEVISTIK listserves (the latter in German), reposted in PAPY-L (papyri) decrying the “cultural atrocity” and inviting us to join them in condemning the move.

But I have mixed feelings.  The library hasn’t photographed any of these mss, as far as I know.  Indeed there doesn’t seem to be a full list of them, even.  They have just one (!) manuscript online.  I suspect that readers have been prevented from photographing them.  One scholar, when I queried why they weren’t online, suggested that it was good for scholars to have to travel to Karlsruhe to consult them!  Frankly, it would be better if these mss were in hands that would record them and place them online.  Perhaps the House of Baden would be agreeable to a proposal to do so!

I have written to various people suggesting that a few volunteers take digital cameras and record them.  It will be interesting to see whether those involved would rather allow the ‘atrocity’ than allow people to photograph them.

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Alqosh monastery bombed?

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
This link, written in 2004, describes damage to the Christian churches at Kurdish hands in Iraq.  It mentions “Rabban Hormizd, the ancient stone monastery outside Alqosh on the Nineveh plain which was bombed so severely that many of its magnificent epigraphic memorials, dating from a hundred centuries ago, have been shattered. These memorials were some of the most precious classical Syriac stone carvings in the world. They lie in a makeshift museum in Alqosh in desperate need of restoration.” Addai Scher catalogued the books at this monastery, also known as Notre-Dame des Semences.  Some at least of these were taken to Baghdad, to the Chaldean Patriarchate (since bombed by the insurgents).  Those are apparently safe.  It all highlights the need to photograph manuscripts urgently; no-one in 1950 would have expected that we would be losing manuscripts like this in 2006!
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New issue of Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies has appeared

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
The new issue of the online peer-reviewed journal of Syriac studies Hugoye has appeared.  It contains a review of Aphrem Barsoum’s “Scattered Pearls”, on which I wrote a few posts back; a travelogue of a journey of 15 scholars last year into the regions in Eastern Turkey around Tur Abdin, Edessa and Nisibis, where there is still a Syriac-speaking population; a catalogue of Syriac Mss. at Yale, which includes a modern copy with unpublished translation of 5th century writer Marutha of Maiperkat on the Council of Nicaea (I have already asked for a copy!); and a discussion of the form of the letter of Mara bar Serapion with reference to the Second Sophistic.  The new issue can be found here:

http://syrcom.cua.edu/hugoye/Vol9No2/index.html

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Translations of Jerome’s biblical prefaces

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
I’d like to highlight that Kevin Edgecomb has been quietly working away translating into English the prefaces to books of the bible from the Vulgate written by St. Jerome. These are all interesting, and offer insight into the way in which Jerome worked. Those done so far are here. We should all be grateful to him. I hope that Kevin will place them in the public domain, and we’ll all be able to use them.
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Lost Syriac manuscripts found?

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
I wrote on Saturday to the author of this site http://sanate.free.fr/.  I got back a most interesting note about the books burned at Seert in 1915 (see preceding post). 

It seems that five years ago a case of books was found in the Bibliothèque Nationale Française in Paris.  It contained some twenty of the most precious manuscripts, brought from Seert by Addai Scher, just before the start of WW1!

I referred to the found and then lost text of “De incarnatione” of Theodore of Mopsuestia.  Is it possible that this text, thought lost, has all the while been slumbering in a packing crate, through two world wars?  I will investigate further…!

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