One of the great problems with accessing the history written by the Coptic Christian writer al-Makin ibn-Amid (13th century) is that you have to deal with manuscripts.<\/p>\n
I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a manuscript typed up.\u00a0 After all, that would mean we could use Google Translate to at least get the gist of what is being said.\u00a0 If I could\u00a0place a free text online, it would probably help a lot.<\/p>\n
So the thing to do, obviously, is get hold of a couple of manuscripts and get someone to type them up.\u00a0 How hard can it be?<\/p>\n
I already have a PDF of a British Library manuscript of the second half of the work.<\/p>\n
This evening I have struggled through the French National Library site, creating an account and requesting an estimate for two microfilms.\u00a0 The site is a nightmare, even though my French is quite good, and I have probably spent an hour so far.<\/p>\n
A correspondent has found a typist in Egypt for me.\u00a0 I have asked him for advice on how best to send money, and we’ll start with the British Library manuscript while I wait for the French to get back from holiday.\u00a0 I don’t actually know whether to start at the back or the front of the PDF!\u00a0 I think it would be wise to do it in chunks, and I don’t know if someone in Egypt could download a 300 mb file anyway!\u00a0 So … cross your fingers for me.\u00a0 Let’s see if it works!<\/p>\n
Of course the output won’t be a critical\u00a0edition.\u00a0 But so what?\u00a0 The professional scholars aren’t showing any signs of producing any edition whatsoever.\u00a0 Let’s take the first step.<\/p>\n
I bet subsequent scholars will complain bitterly about my “vulgate” text, tho!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the great problems with accessing the history written by the Coptic Christian writer al-Makin ibn-Amid (13th century) is that you have to deal with manuscripts. I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a manuscript typed up.\u00a0 After all, that would mean we could use Google Translate to at least get the gist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[131],"class_list":["post-12349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-my-diary-announcements","tag-al-makin"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}