Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
The 5th British Patristics conference is beginning today in London, and it runs until Friday. There is a great mass of interesting papers on offer.
Unfortunately I am unable to attend. I wish that I was there, and I booked back in January. But a virus has laid me low since Saturday – undoubtedly acquired on the aircraft back from Rome a week earlier.
I hope that perhaps some other attendees will post accounts of the event. These conferences are uniformly excellent.
2014 has certainly started with a bang! Here I am, on the Friday of the first week back, and it seems as if I was never on holiday!
The two monochrome microfilm-PDF’s of the unpublished history by the 13th century Arabic Christian writer al-Makin, from the Bibliothèque Nationale Français are now on my hard disk. Obtaining them cost over 200 euros, which I grudge greatly. On the other hand I do like the BNF’s new website and system of ordering online! This works very well. Now if only we could get colour pictures of manuscripts at a reasonable price!!
The microfilms are at least clear and easily readable, which is more than the last ones obtained from the BnF were.
A week or two back Amazon (US) sent me a gift card. This allowed me to buy the new translation of the patrialogical texts on Constantinople, about which I wrote a while back. It was on the door mat this evening when I arrived home. It’s a useful item to have, that’s for sure, although fairly elementary. One thing that I did not like: all footnotes are at the end. I had forgotten how annoying that is.
I’ve also signed up for the 5th British Patristics conference, to be held at Kings College London on 3-5th September, 2014. I have attended two of these conferences, and they were both superior to the international patristics conference in Oxford. The reason for this is that the time allowed for papers is longer, and so the papers contain more.
On a personal note, I’ve decided to make another effort to see the Northern Lights this year.