Souvenirs of the Sinai

One of the manuscripts digitized this week by Digita Vaticana is Ott. gr. 424, Rome's bit of a Greek-language codex that is now dispersed in three places. The curious story of how it came to be thus dismembered was related a few months ago in an article by Pasquale Orsini. (Follow the link to read it on Academia.edu. The text is in Italian.)

The Vatican codex was part of the second volume of a collection of homilies by the patristic author Gregory of Nazianzen. It seems to have been copied in the ninth century, possibly in Constantinople, and it later entered the library at the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai in Egypt.

A large chunk of it was taken from there between 1718 and 1721 by a Maronite priest, Andrea Scandar. In Rome, Scandar deposited five books he had taken from St Catherine's including this item.

One very much doubts this was a legitimate removal (there's now a project to trace purloined Sinai manuscripts). A couple more folios were souvenired from Sinai in 1844 by the German Lutheran scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf, who is best known for spiriting away much of the Codex Sinaiticus Greek Bible from the same library. Tischendorf's folios of Gregory's Homilies are now in Leipzig, Germany. "His" folios are bound in Cod. gr. 69 there, but have not yet been digitized.

In an interesting piece of scholarly detective work, on which I rely for the account above, Orsini has now identified more folios that are still at St Catherine's. We might see them digitized some day too.

The full list of five digitizations on May 11 and 13, which brings the front-page total to 1,985:

1. Barb.lat.387: Orationes septem sancti Gregorii papae with fine 15th-century illuminations. The picture above shows John the Evangelist on Patros. The eagle (John's symbol) is holding his ink supply. It's your guess as to why this Italianate John needs to tickle one nostril with a feather. Perhaps the artist just meant that hand to be held to John's ear, waiting for the word of God to arrive, ready to stab quill-pen to papyrus to take dictation, but the composition is unfortunate.
2. Barb.lat.4295: shows coats of arms, from the library of Federico da Montefeltro
3. Borg.ill.1: this seems to be a bilingual Croatian-Latin text with glossary containing a church history and scriptures in Croatian (in a form of Cyrillic script) by the 17th-century Croatian archbishop Andrea Zmaievich
4. Ott.gr.424: Gregory of Nazianzen, as described above
5. Ott.lat.66: the Codex Ottobonianus, copied in North Italy in the 7th or 8th century: it contains the Heptateuch in the Vulgate version interspersed with portions in the older Vetus Latina text. See the next post.

If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 11.]

Studia Patristica

Amazingly hard-working Markus Vinzent of the University of London has just announced that the proceedings of the 2011 Oxford Patristics Conference are likely to appear in print this summer. This will not be a nice tidy bound book that one can use to press flowers or thump a burglar: it will be an entire bookshelf of "around" twenty volumes, according to the announcement.

Over the past year, Professor Vinzent has edited hundreds of conference papers to create something the size of a major encyclopaedia. This enormous thing will emerge as volumes 53 to 72 of Studia Patristica, a journal that commenced in 1957. The fact that the cumulative run of a journal can increase by 38 per cent as a result of a single conference is alarming confirmation of the fear that we now entering an age when writers may soon outnumber readers. All of this excellent research will no doubt vanish into the shelves of research libraries and will be summoned by the occasional (wealthy) researcher from Peeters Publishers' full-text database, but how many of the articles will achieve a total global readership of even ten or twenty or thirty? A sobering thought.

 My own paper, "The Great Stemma: a Late Antique Diagrammatic Chronicle of Pre-Christian Time", will appear in the Historica volume alongside papers by four eminent historians which I found among the most interesting of the entire conference:

• Guy Stroumsa's "Jerusalem, Israel, Athens, Jerusalem and Mecca: The Patristic Crucible of the Abrahamic Religions," which was a provocative exploration of how Islam, Judaism and Christianity are equal heirs of Late Antique intellectual debates; 
• Josef Lössl's "Memory as History? Patristic Perspectives," which was a justification of his revisionist approach in his new textbook, The Early Church;
• Hervé Inglebert's "La formation des élites chrétiennes d’Augustin à Cassiodore," which told the interesting story of advanced education from the fourth century;
• Pauline Allen's "Prolegomena to a Study of the Letter-Bearer in Christian Antiquity," which lays the groundwork for an interesting book she is writing about Late Antique travellers who deliver letters.

As far as I can tell, Peeters does not have any kind of open-access arrangement for this journal, which is a pity.

It would appear that Martin Wallraff's discovery that Eusebius of Caesarea wrote another, previously unnoticed set of canon tables, which he made public at the 2011 conference, will not be written up in Studia Patristica, but in the Dumbarton Oaks Papers. The reason, I believe, is that this annual US journal is able to include high-quality colour reproductions of the new-found tables. Presumably that journal's moving firewall will allow the Wallraff paper to be downloaded for free from the year 2023.