From my diary – more on the textual criticism of John the Deacon

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Last weekend I started reworking some code in QuickLatin, in order to allow me to add syntax notes on the fly, rather than having to break off and make code changes every time.  This went well, but is only partly done.  I had to break off early in the week to attend to other things, which left little time.

So I returned little-by-little to the tedious but mundane task of collating the manuscripts of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas.  In principle you just go for it.  You “get into the zone” and the lines fly by.  Sadly the days in which I used to dose myself up with masses of diet Coke and work far into the night are gone, so each day I only collate a few lines.  That means that it takes ages.  But by steady plodding I have reached the end of chapter 7.

Screenshot of Word document of collation

By the time that I reached the end of chapter 5, I had 6 obvious locations in the text where there was textual variation that might divide the manuscripts into families.  Unfortunately two of these – starting “hactenus” and “trade” – proved to have no value.

These were sentences or clauses that were missing from one early witness.  I thought that if I could find other manuscripts with the same lacuna, this would show that they were copies.  Sadly these were few.

I was uncomfortable working with just four locations for comparison.  These did produce some division in the manuscripts, but I was finding too many “mixed” families.  Instinct suggested that I was probably not doing this correctly.  So I pressed on, noting possible other locations for comparision, and marking them with a header starting “VARIANT”.  That means that I can navigate quickly to them in the Word document.

Chapter 6 only gave me one more worthwhile location for comparison, but chapter 7 gave me four.  That’s good.  But I will press on.

It’s also obvious that all the early editions are bad.  Mombritius in 1477-8 has a defective text.  Lippomano in 1553 basically copies him, but has fixed a few places.  Falconius in 1751 has made arbitrary changes all over the place, all worthless or worse.  Corsi’s modern edition is not a critical text but is far better than them all, even though as sources he only had one manuscript (in Berlin) and Falconius.

It’s interesting that very few indeed of the variants involve any change of meaning. I notice this because I revise the English translation as I go along.  I made the translation originally from Falconius, before I came across the awful mess that is chapters 12-13, too great to ignore, even for someone uninterested in text critical issues.  Then I revised it against Mombritius.  Now I revise it again against the text that I create as I go along; but the changes are few.

One variant was interesting.  Nicholas “regionis illius pontificalem accepit infulam”, received the pontifical mitre of that country.  In Mombritius this is “insula”, i.e. island.  Falconius has “infula”, but I misread it and wrote “insula” here too.  All the manuscripts have “infulam”, including the Berlin manuscript that Corsi worked from:

But Corsi misread this when preparing his Italian translation (prior to making his edition), and he translates this as “ricevette le insegne pontificali”, received the pontifical insignia.

I certainly never knew that the word “infula” existed.  I googled “pontificalis insula” and I found a match, or so I thought here, where we find  “desiderabat enim pontificalem insulam deponere”, “he desired to lay down the pontifical ‘insula'”.

But I had neglected to look up a line and see “effundens”, with the “f” indistinguishable from “s”.  So is this “insulam” or “infulam”?  Other texts with “pontificalem insulam” do exist.  The meaning is “pontifical insignia”.

Luckily I noticed, while collating.  An “infula” was originally a fillet of cloth, or a ribband, worn in the hair of a priest.  In later ecclesiastical usage it refers – I think – to a part of the mitre, and so is used for the mitre itself.

I could wish that there was a site dedicated to pictures of ecclesiastical apparel, labelled with names!

I’ll press on into chapter 8, and then think about whether to have another go at classifying the manuscripts.

Onward!

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Making Arabic Literature Accessible – Joep Lameer

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I was delighted to hear that somebody had sorted out Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, and produced an English translation.  This was a Herculean job, and the man who did it was Dutch scholar Joep Lameer.  I was even more delighted to hear that he is at work on translating Sezgin’s Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, and has produced four volumes already.  I find that he is doing a whole raft of useful things, using a rare combination of skills and dedication, particularly with reference to Islamic philosophy.

I was curious to know how somebody ends up doing all this.  In response to my enquiry, Dr Lameer very kindly sent me an outline of himself and his work, which I reproduce here.

PhD Arabic Leiden 1992; I lived and worked in Holland, France, Iran, and, since 2007, again Holland, mostly outside academia but publishing books and articles nonetheless. My focus is the history of Islamic philosophy and logic, mostly epistemology. I work with Arabic and Persian sources.

My translation of Brockelmann’s Geschichte der Arabische Litteratur (History of the Arabic Written Tradition. 6 vols, 2016-2019)  turned out to be a success, so Brill Publishers decided to publish Fuat Sezgin’s 17-volume Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums in English translation as well (The Arabic Writing Tradition, an Historical Survey). So far, three volumes have been published.   I spend most of my time on this. Nevertheless, I am also working with young Iranian scholars on two text editions: the Physics of Abu l-‘Abbas Lawkari’s Bayan al-haqq (a philosophical encyclopaedia by a second-generation student of Avicenna). This is an Arabic text; the other is a 25-page Shi’a creed by Nasir al-Din Tusi, Fusul dar usul, which we shall publish in Persian (original), two ancient Arabic translations, and an English translation by me. Besides, I am working on an inventory of all the manuscripts of Abu Nasr Farabi’s works on logic with a scholar from Germany. If I had more time I would do more, especially on the term tasdiq in epistemology (I’m sure you know Cantwell-Smith’s “Faith as tasdiq”).[1]

That is about it. Oh, I almost forgot: I recently also oversaw the second, completed edition of C.A. Storey’s Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey in 5 volumes and one Index volume. And I also just submitted an article on extant Persian – Arabic and Arabic – Persian translations of philosophical texts in the libraries of Iran. It will be part of a future volume in a series on philosophy in the Islamic world by Ulrich Rudolph and Peter Adamson.

I think this is a simply remarkable body of work, using skills that most of us can only dream of.  Well done!

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  1. [1]W. Cantwell-Smith, “Faith as Taṣdīq”, In: Parviz Morewedge, Islamic Philosophical Theology, State University of NY (1979), p. 96-119.↩

Fundamental Reference Works for the Study of Arabic Literature

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Arabic literature is a closed book to most of us, and it is hard to know where to start, where to find out what exists. People refer to “the Hadith”, but where would you find this?

In fact there is an incredibly useful summary of the reference works to use, which I came across a couple of days ago, on p.xiii-xiv of P.Y. Skreslet & R. Skreslet, The Literature of Islam: A Guide to the Primary Sources in English Translation, (2006).  The book itself looks excellent, and I have just ordered a copy.  The Google Books Preview is here, but I cannot say how much is visible at any moment.  So here is that basic overview of where to start.

This does not cover Arabic Christian Literature, for which G. Graf, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Litteratur (5 vols) remains the key source.

Those who share a bibliographer’s concern for the analysis of a given literature should be aware of a few of the indispensable sources in Islamic studies dealing with this discipline.

One of the great bibliographers of all time lived in the city of Baghdad in the tenth century of the Common Era (all dates in this volume are stated according to the Western calendar). He was Muhammad ibn Ishaq al-Nadim (d. ca. 990), son of a prominent bookseller, probably attached to the court or to the libraries of noble citizens as a savant or consultant. Al-Nadim created the first comprehensive bibliography of Arabic literature, meticulously classified according to his own complex system, which was based upon the enumeration of the sciences by the early Islamic philosophers. He called it Fihrist al-‘ulum or Index of the Sciences; it is also known by the title Kitab al-fihrist al-nadim, or Book of the Index of al-Nadim (an-nah-DEEM). The work is divided into ten major classes by subject area, within which authors are listed chronologically; a bio-bibliographical entry for each author provides as much as was known of his full name and genealogy, information and anecdotes about his life, and a listing of all of his extant works. Al-Nadim emphasizes that he is personally acquainted with the vast majority of these works and reports information received from others with attribution. Although regrettably many of the works al-Nadim mentions have not survived, the Fihrist is still an invaluable source for the first three-and-a-half centuries of Islamic learning.

There is a Wikipedia article for this here.  An English translation of the Fihrist was prepared by Bayard Dodge, The Fihrist of Al-Nadim: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture, Columbia University Press (1970).

Specialists in Islamic literature must make the effort to become conversant with Carl Brockelmann’s classic of Orientalist scholarship, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur.2 It is partly a narrative history, but chiefly an encyclopedia of entries on individual Arab writers and their work. Vol. 1 is organized chronologically, then by type/genre of literature (or subject matter), then geographically; vol. 2 organizes first by chronology, then geography, then genre or subject. Indexes for authors, titles, and the European editors of texts are found in the third supplemental volume (after the entries on the modern era up to 1939). Even those who read German easily find Brockelmann’s work challenging to use, thanks to his difficult systems of abbreviation and transliteration, the lack of cross-references, the relationship between the supplements and the original volumes, and the proliferation of addenda and corrigenda.

There are seven volumes of Brockelmann;  vol. 1 (1898); vol. 2 (1902); Supplement vol. 1; vol. 2; vol. 3; and a second edition of the first two volumes, referring to the supplements, in two volumes.  It is indeed impenetrable.  An English translation of the whole thing, cleaned up, expanded and generally made usable, was made by Joep Lameer, History of the Arabic Written Tradition, Brill (2016), in 2 volumes with 4 volumes of supplements.

In the early 1960s Fuat Sezgin, a brilliant Turkish scholar resident in Germany, began to update and revise Brockelmann’s work to incorporate many newly discovered materials and manuscripts. Sezgin ended up writing an enormous and entirely new work, dealing especially with the sciences (mathematics, astronomy, geography/cartography, medicine, chemistry, etc.) and is considered the leading authority on that literature. His nine-volume work, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, was published in 1967-1984, with an index volume in 1995; vols. 10-12 followed in 2000? Of these, vol. 1 is the source for information about the traditional disciplines of Islamic religion: Qur’anic studies, hadith, law, theology, and mysticism (vol. 2 is Poesie). There is a scholarly precis or introduction to each area, then encyclopedia entries on the individual authors; vol. 1 is organized by genre/subject first, then chronology, then geography or theological/legal school of thought. Sezgin’s work is in German, but there are very clear tables of contents and indexes in every volume, and standard editorial conventions are used throughout.

There are 17 volumes in all; vols. 1-9 available from Brill, and vols. 10-17 from the author.  Thankfully Joep Lameer is in the process of translating all this into English also, and volumes 1-3 have appeared from Brill (see here), and volume 4 is in progress.  There is an amusing yet brilliant guide to Sezgin’s work by Richard Heffron here.

Anyone doing research in Islamic culture and religion must learn to use the somewhat cumbersome but indispensable Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1960-2004) and its valuable index volumes. For twentieth-century information, the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World is a must (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). And for literary figures in particular, the two-volume Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, edited by Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey (London: Routledge, 1998), is a very convenient source for ready reference, providing concise but informative entries on scholars and writers throughout the centuries. These entries include brief biographical accounts, principal works and their significance, original-language text editions, and some secondary reading. There are also topical articles on literary genres, technical terms, historical movements, and developments, produced by an array of respected contributors.

These works are available in the usual places.

Other useful reference sources are mentioned in the chapter endnotes of this volume and in our bibliography.4

Among these they mention in the latter Margaret Anderson, Arabic Materials in English Translation: A Bibliography of Works from the Pre-Islamic Period to 1977 (1980), about which Google says:

This bibliography, of over 1600 items, represents for the most part English language translations of original Arabic works. A few of the translations listed here, most notably of those of writings by Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, are not originally Arabic, but are translations made of Arabic editions….The aim of the compilation is two-fold: first, to provide both students and the general public with an interest in the Arab world (but with little or no facility in the Arabic language), as full a listing of translated Arabic materials as possible; and also to provide for those doing research in such fields as history and history of science, political science, comparative religion, comparative literature, and law, and touching on the Arab world only occasionally, with a partial substitute for the original materials whose language they have had no previous need to master.

This must be useful also.  The authors modestly do not list their own book, but of course it too looks essential to me.

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An English translation of Brockelmann’s “Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur”!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

If you want to know what texts exist in Arabic, then the classic resource is Carl Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, published in seven volumes, in a terrible, disorganised, highly abbreviated format, starting in the 19th century.  This is essentially unreadable, even if you have good German. The first 2 volumes are the original edition; there are 3 volumes of supplements; and then 2 volumes of a revised edition which refers to both the original and the supplements.  It is a monster work of scholarship, but quite unusable.  Paula Skreslet wrote:

Specialists in Islamic literature must make the effort to become conversant with Carl Brockelmann’s classic of Orientalist scholarship, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur. It is partly a narrative history, but chiefly an encyclopedia of entries on individual Arab writers and their work. Vol. 1 is organized chronologically, then by type/genre of literature (or subject matter), then geographically; vol. 2 organizes first by chronology, then geography, then genre or subject. Indexes for authors, titles, and the European editors of texts arc found in the third supplemental volume (after the entries on the modern era up to 1939). Even those who read German easily find Brockelmann’s work challenging to use, thanks to his difficult systems of abbreviation and transliteration, the lack of cross-references, the relationship between the supplements and the original volumes, and the proliferation of addenda and corrigenda.[1]

I commented on some of its failings back in 2011.  I have since learned that this was not the fault of the author, but of an unscrupulous publisher who forced all this upon him.  But it was obvious that something better was needed, and in English.

What I had not known until last night was that Dutch translator Joep Lameer has done just that.  He’s translated the lot into English, reorganised it, de-abbreviated the text, and generally cleaned it up and brought it up to date.  This is no small task, as I discovered when I attempted to do this for the various literary lives of Mohammed. What a hero!

His translation is titled, “History of the Arabic Written Tradition”, and is available from Brill here, for about $50 a volume.  That’s cheap for most of their works, although still a lot for independent scholars; but if you’re working with Arabic at all, the book is an essential reference and you will just have to take the hit.

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  1. [1]Paula Youngman Skreslet, Rebecca Skreslet, The Literature of Islam: A Guide to the Primary Sources in English Translation, (2006), p.xiii-xiv.  Preview.↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I had forgotten how much I despise Microsoft software.  A couple of hours ago I decided to make a fix to my QuickLatin code.  More fool me.  Three hours later, I am no further forward and have spent the entire time struggling with their wretched development environment.  It was all working before I started.  I had to deinstall Visual Studio and reinstall, then reinstall an add-on, then work out why it wasn’t showing, then disable and re-enable to make the window pop-up…. bah!

I had to break off and retreat to my sofa for some intensive googling from my phone.  This did produce some results; but nothing that I could do would persuade Visual Studio to connect to its own marketplace.  The meaningless error message carefully conceals whatever the problem might be.

Part way through I wondered if I ought to purchase a more recent version.  Well, that led me down a rabbit hole as well.  All they want to sell you is incredibly expensive monthly subscriptions / licenses.  I never did find out what they would want to sell me what I wanted.  No wonder pirate keys circulate on the web.

Just so much pain, just to get started with anything.

In corporate IT departments they have pages on their intranets, describing just what “incantation” will make the software work as they need it to.  These can be very lengthy and detailed indeed.  Sixty sections of instructions is nothing.  But no ordinary person can spend that amount of time.

I’m still busy collating the text of John the Deacon against the manuscripts.  This was just something different to do.

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Analysing the manuscripts of the Life of St Nicholas by John the Deacon – part 2 – the 12th c. manuscripts

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In my last post, I analysed the 9-11th century manuscripts of John the Deacon, and found that they fell neatly into three families.  These I have colour-coded as green, blue and purple.  I’ve only really got three data points, so this is all a bit provisional.  The other three turned out not to vary much.

This evening I have completed the task of applying the same 6 passages to the 12th century manuscripts.  The same three families appear; but we also  get a brown family, with mixed readings.

This is perhaps to be expected.  But this determination is relying on a single data point in each case, which is certainly too few to be conclusive.

I had to download another four manuscripts last night.  One of these proved to have enormous page images, so that the whole download was 3.2Gb in size!  This proved too much for Adobe Acrobat Pro 2020, which combined all the images into a PDF, but then refused to save the PDF as “too large” (?!)

I’ve also found a second manuscript in Beneventan book-hand, where again the “Nacta” looks awfully like “Notata” if you don’t know the unusual shape of Beneventan “a” and “t” (which is well explained in this link).

I’m also finding more examples of abbreviated versions of the text, or a text which really belongs to a different version of the Life of St Nicholas.  These, of course, I have to ignore.

I shall have to ponder what all this tells me!

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Apologies for spam

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Spam is now starting to appear here in the comments.  For this I apologise.  It seems that Akismet have decided to force everyone to pay for their product.  To make us do this, this evening they have disabled my API key without warning.  Please bear with me while I deal with this.

Greed is horrible.

In the short term, all comments will require manual approval by me.  Sorry.

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Analysing the manuscripts of the Life of St Nicholas by John the Deacon

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have made a full collation of all the 9-10th century manuscripts of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas, as far as the beginning of chapter 6, where manuscript Q (BNF lat. 17625) breaks off.  I’ve recollated the first chapter, since I did that in a rather perfunctory way.

But how do I work out the relationships of the manuscripts?  I’m doing this blind – I can find no “how to” guide – so I’m just guessing, and trying things out.

This evening I decided to pick three places in chapter 1, where the collation already suggested differences in the manuscripts, and collate the 11th century manuscripts for these places in the text.  I’ve put a “heading 3” in my text, so that I can see the Latin around the area:

Screenshot of my Word text with H3 markers visible

I’m experimenting with a trial of Adobe Acrobat Pro 2020 (permanent license), which allows me to open the PDFs in tabs, unlike my elderly copy of Acrobat Pro 9.  I took the opportunity to add bookmarks and stickys to the PDF of each manuscript, as far as chapter 6, as I went.

After I had collated the 10 manuscripts for the three places in chapter 1, I felt the results were a bit thin.  So decided to collate another three places from chapter 5, where I knew that a line, or a phrase, was omitted.

This I did in a separate Word document.  I had a list of manuscripts; and I indicated the 6 places, comma-separated, against each.  In retrospect a spreadsheet might serve better.  They all started out as black text.

But the results were rather interesting, and here they are:

List of manuscripts and variants

Once I was done, I colour-coded manuscripts that were basically the same.  I have three groups!

Not all of my “places” were significant, at least in the 11th century.  Thus I chose “inclammationem” because I had a bunch of witnesses on both sides:

  • “inclamationem”, “crying out against” – Fal., M, P, Q, O, B, C; “in cachinnationem”, “in immoderate laughter” – Corsi, A, Linz 473 (13th), Munich Clm 12642 (14th); “in vocem” – Mom., Lipp.;

But in actual fact there was no variation on this, at least not in the 11th century.  It looks as if it must originate later.  Likewise the sentence beginning “hactenus” and the clause starting “trade” are unimportant.

But “et laudem / ex laude” and “aede / sede” form a clear group.  Likewise the weird Nacta / Notata / etc lines up with them, and splits the “ex laude” group further.

That’s a useful result.  I have learned a bunch about ten manuscripts from this exercise, which took me less than an hour.

So far so good.  Onward.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

For the last week I have been steadily collating a group of manuscripts against my text of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas.  I have a list of the earliest manuscripts accessible to me, in century order.  I have a 9th century manuscript (M), and three 10th century manuscripts (P, Q and O), which form the core of what I am doing.  These are the “four horsemen” of my edition.  I also have the four early editions.  Finally there are two manuscripts of the 10-11th century (V and B) and a couple of randoms that I am consulting as well.

It’s actually rather rewarding.  It brings you into very close contact with the text.  You start to get a feel fairly quickly for the relationships.  Quite often the four horsemen disagree with the early editions, but the readings of the latter sometimes appear in V.  P, Q and O are closely related; so much so that when P is unreadable – and it is getting very unreadable – you can often work out what it is saying from Q or O.

I’ve steadily made a complete collation as far as the third sentence of chapter 6.  But I have now run into a problem.

P was OK when I started but is largely unreadable except on the spine-side of the page.  But I have just turned over the page in Q, to folio 261v, and found, to my horror, that there is no more.  The text breaks off after the third sentence of chapter 6.  There’s some irrelevant material written later; but there are no more folios in the manuscript.  Indeed the suddenly worn state of the page indicates that this was indeed the last leaf.

The last page of Q – BNF lat. 17625 (10th c.), fol. 261v

That’s a nuisance.  I was quite happy to continue collating away.  But I shall need to change my approach.

I already have three or four places which I have labelled “major variants” – where a sentence is missing in some witnesses, or else the variation is great enough to separate the manuscripts into families.  It’s not as many as I would like, but it ought to be enough to start to classify later manuscripts.  I have thirteen manuscripts of the 11th century to hand.  Maybe it is time to mark these up, for these variants.  Is there, perhaps, a copy of P / Q, with which I can carry on the full collation?

The other problem, that today I have started to feel, is that it is a pain to have fifteen Adobe Acrobat windows open, containing the editions and the manuscripts.  I’m managing because I have three screens on my PC, and I make sure they all open in the right-hand screen.  But what I want, I suspect, is tabs.  I want them all to open in a single window, and allow me to arrange them.

Foxit Reader does allow me to open them in tabs; but I don’t seem to be able to open the set in one go.  Pity.  Much worse is that I can’t add sticky notes.  Bookmarking chapters, and adding stickies is something that I am doing as I go through collating each manuscript.  It really helps.

So I shall have to divert from the task for a bit in order to solve these side-problems.

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A new BHL-type database of Latin hagiographical texts and manuscripts at the IRHT?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It seems that something is going on at the IRHT (= L’Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes).  For those who do not know, the IRHT is the French manuscripts people.  They do all sorts of very useful things.  But there is no announcement, nor much online.  It’s a new database, designed to allow you to look up a particular Latin hagiographical text, and find what manuscripts it appears in.

We already have something of the sort.  A couple of decades ago, the Bollandist “BHL” index (= Bibliographica Hagiographica Latina) was turned into the BHLms database.  I use it intensely.  You look up a text by the BHL reference and it will tell you the libraries that have copies in manuscript, the manuscript reference number (= shelfmark), and the pages or folio numbers.  It’s great. But it is obviously old.

Last night I saw a job advert.  It’s for 6 months, starting in September.  It’s actually in various places, but I saw it here.  Excerpts (Google translate) –

Job offer – Study engineer (M/F). Feeding a database devoted to Latin hagiographic manuscripts

As part of the “Latin Legends” project – the result of a partnership between the IRHT, the Société des Bollandistes (Brussels) and the University of Namur – the IRHT offers a 6-month fixed-term contract to contribute to the data load of a new database dedicated to Latin hagiographic manuscripts.

This database, still in the process of being run in, is intended to list all the manuscript witnesses (medieval and modern) of Latin hagiographic texts identified by the “Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina” (“BHL”). Once published, it will work in conjunction with the other databases hosted by the IRHT (Medium, Pinakes, Biblissima).

Sounds interesting!

– he will contribute to integrating the data from the Bollandist files (approximately 9000 handwritten files, now digitized on the IRHT servers). If necessary, he will complete the information, and, in case of doubt, will verify its accuracy.  …

The recruited research engineer will work under the scientific direction of Cécile Lanéry-Ouvrard (IRHT Researcher), within the Latin section of the IRHT (Aubervilliers site). He will also be in contact with the other researchers and technicians involved in the “Latin Legendaries” project (in particular Cyril Masset, from the IT department of the IRHT, and Fernand Peloux, researcher at the CNRS in Toulouse). On occasion, he may be required to correspond with the Société des Bollandistes de Bruxelles, or with other researchers specializing in hagiography. 

Part of the work may be carried out remotely, with this restriction, however, that he has permanent access to the tools necessary for the proper performance of his activities (access to IRHT servers, access to bibliographic tools, etc.)

The list of skills is formidable, but this isn’t really an IT role, as one bit amusingly makes plain:

– some skills or previous experience in the field of databases and their operation would be welcome, to facilitate exchanges with the IT department of the IRHT, responsible for maintaining the database.

So it basically requires manuscripts skills, rather than hard-core SQL.  I wonder what the database actually is.

A bit of googling reveals another worker on the project, Antoine Charrié-Benoist, who is listed as doing data load for the BHLms database, and gave a paper about the project.

It would be good to know more.  But clearly whatever database is planned will be immensely useful.  Excellent news.

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