Greetings to any Mertonians who are lured hither by the mention of this site in Postmaster.\u00a0 Those who remember me may recall that even at college I was interested in the Church fathers!<\/p>\n
My apologies for the limited blogging.\u00a0 I have been interviewing for a new contract this week.\u00a0 One that I had favoured, with IBM, has given me much anguish.\u00a0\u00a0Who would believe that, under their non-negotiable contract, the contractor is expected to work 8 hours a day for a fixed sum, and for free for up to four more hours a day? Or that the luckless souls so entrapped were contractually unable to leave during the entire 6 month term? Or that if they did, if they got sick, or their children did, they forfeited a month’s salary and were the subject of legal action for up to ca. $10,000?\u00a0 I cannot imagine making such demands of another human being who simply wants to earn some money from me.<\/p>\n
Back in the world of real and important things, the Eusebius volume is still progressing.\u00a0 I have been unable to work on the corrections for it as yet, tho.\u00a0 But I had an email from the lady responsible for the Coptic, with some further details.<\/p>\n
Yesterday I was talking about chapter titles.\u00a0 In medieval manuscripts we often find ancient works divided into chapters, and these often labelled capituli<\/em> or kephalaia<\/em>.\u00a0 There are often short pieces of text at the start of the chapter, in red, which we might think of as chapter titles.\u00a0 But it is a real question whether these are authorial.\u00a0 The research has not really been done.<\/p>\n Years ago I collected articles on this subject, all more or less poor or limited in scope.\u00a0 Often these referred to the 1882\u00a0Das antike Buchwesen<\/em> (The ancient book trade<\/em>) by Birt; or the even more elderly 1872 volume Griechische Literaturgeschichte<\/em> by Bergk.\u00a0 The latter gives a short list of ancient authors who mention kephalaia<\/em>; whatever that means to them at that date.\u00a0 But it is plainly incomplete, since I myself know of an interesting quotation in the praefatio of\u00a0Cyril of Alexandria’s Commentary on John<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 I know of this only because I scanned the translation to place it online.<\/p>\n \u00a0The subjoined subscription of the chapters, will shew the subjects over which our discourse extends, to which we have also annexed numbers, that what is sought may be readily found by the readers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In other words, he has written a praefatio<\/em>, then given a list of chapters, and numbered them (and presumably placed numbers in the text?) so that the readers can find them.<\/p>\n Do these words\u00a0indicate that Cyril is doing something which is a novelty?\u00a0 If it is not, why does he mention it?<\/p>\n I’ve long hankered to know, all the same, what Bergk and Birt say.\u00a0 But I knew better than to borrow their books.\u00a0 I don’t read German very well.\u00a0 Trying to find whatever there was on chapter titles in these long texts would be fruitless, and hard on the eyes.\u00a0 So I never did.\u00a0 But that was then.<\/p>\n How times change!\u00a0 Today you can download the two books as PDF’s.\u00a0 This I have done, and OCR’d them.\u00a0 So I now have searchable PDF’s.\u00a0 I can do a search on “kapit” (short for kapiteln).\u00a0 I can find all the passages where the word appears.\u00a0 I can then select the text, paste it into Google translate, and get a very good idea of what is being said, right there!\u00a0<\/p>\n I may paste the text and translation of the relevant portions in this blog, if my job-hunting permits.\u00a0 A list of ancient discussions of the subject, with verbatim quotation, would be a useful thing to do.<\/p>\n Of course the other question is whether a TLG search on “kephal” would produce more.\u00a0 I might try that on the CDROM.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Greetings to any Mertonians who are lured hither by the mention of this site in Postmaster.\u00a0 Those who remember me may recall that even at college I was interested in the Church fathers! My apologies for the limited blogging.\u00a0 I have been interviewing for a new contract this week.\u00a0 One that I had favoured, with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_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":[391,728],"class_list":["post-5022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-my-diary-announcements","tag-chapter-titles","tag-from-my-diary"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5022","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=5022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5022\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n