Free Brill Book: The Principal Pauline Epistles: A Collation of Old Latin Evidence

A new publication in the esteemed series New Testament Tools, Studies and Documents (Brill) has been published:  The Principal Pauline Epistles: A Collation of Old Latin Evidence, edited by H.A.G. Houghton, C.M. Kreinecker, R.M. MacLachlan, and C.J. Smith. 

The book is a verse-by-verse collation of Old Latin manuscripts, the lemmata of early Latin commentaries and testimonia extracts in Romans, 1–2 Corinthians and Galatians.
 
This is the final output from the ERC-funded COMPAUL project and therefore an open access title which may be downloaded for free here. 
The transcriptions underlying the collation are publically available at www.epistulae.org.

Here is a short extract from the Preface to give you the background and scope of the volume:

In 2011, a European Research Council Starting Grant enabled Hugh Houghton to assemble a team at the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) in the University of Birmingham to investigate the earliest commentaries on Paul as sources for the biblical text (the COMPAUL project). In order to assist with analysis of the numerous early Latin expositions, full electronic transcriptions were produced of the four principal Pauline Epistles in three types of material:

1. Manuscripts identified as having an Old Latin affiliation;
2. Existing scholarly reconstructions of the Pauline text of individual early Latin commentators;
3. Early collections of biblical testimonia.

These were then automatically collated to provide a representative sample of early Latin readings which might be reflected in commentaries and their textual tradition. Although the publication of this data was not part of the original plan for the COMPAUL project, it soon became evident that—until the appearance of the corresponding volumes of the Vetus Latina edition—making this material more widely available would be of service to scholars in a variety of fields.

ETC Interview with Hugh Houghton: Part 2

Congratulations to Drew Longacre for winning our book giveaway! Thanks to all who participated. I have taken note of your many suggestions for future interviewees. Now here is part 2 of our interview with Hugh Houghton in which we learn of his secret life as a Disney star! Part 1 is here.

You work at the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) where “computer methods are now fundamental to every stage of the editorial process.” The emergence of digital texts has been hailed as “revolutionary,” something that frees “writing from the frozen structure of the page” (source). From your vantage, how important are electronic texts to how we conceive of texts, how we use them, and how we edit them?

It has become something of a truism, but I do agree with those who say that the advent of digital media is likely to have an even greater impact on our approach to texts than the invention of printing. Of course, in textual criticism, one of the principal benefits of digitisation has been the imaging of primary sources, meaning that we can read the pages of manuscripts from across the world without even travelling to the nearest library.

But electronic text itself offers an even more powerful research tool in terms of the questions we can ask, from examining a particular copyist’s spelling habits or use of abbreviations to reconstructing phylogenetic relationships for an entire textual tradition. First of all, though, we have to encode texts in such a way that we can use them to answer these questions, and no doubt others which we haven’t yet thought of.

The adoption of editing software such as Peter Robinson’s COLLATE has completely changed the way we approach the task of editing the New Testament: no longer is the focus on the painstaking assembly of a critical apparatus, summarising as much information as economically as possible. Instead, the software allows us to generate a collation automatically from transcription files, and the emphasis is now on preparing an accurate full-text electronic transcription of each witness which can then be explored and re-used in the ways I mentioned.

Postdoctoral job opening at ITSEE in Birmingham

Hugh Houghton who leads the COMPAUL project at ITSEE in Birmingham announces a job opening:

There is a vacancy for a postdoctoral research fellow to work on the COMPAUL project at the University of Birmingham, investigating the earliest commentaries on Paul as sources for the biblical text.

We seek a scholar with expertise in classical or biblical Greek, an interest in the New Testament and experience of working with electronic and online corpora. The principal duties will be the analysis of early Greek commentaries on Paul and the creation of a database of biblical quotations.
The research fellow will join an established team working in the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham.

The appointment will start from 1st October 2014, or as soon as possible thereafter. The post is initially for 12 months, with the possibility of extension.

I apologise for the very short notice, but the deadline for applications is: 7th September 2014.

Informal enquiries may be addressed to H.A.G.Houghton@bham.ac.uk
Applications must be made online through the portal at https://static.wcn.co.uk/company/birminghamuniversity/internet.html
A job description may be downloaded from http://www.download.bham.ac.uk/vacancies/jd/44515.pdf

I should point out that this is a terrific chance to join a leading team of specialists in New Testament textual criticism as well as electronic editing.

See also this previous post.

PhD Opportunity at ITSEE (Birmingham)

Hugh Houghton of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE), University of Birmingham, is principal investigator of the COMPAUL project on "The Earliest Commentaries on Paul as Sources for the Biblical Text." Houghton announces the following opportunity for a student doing a PhD. in the project he is leading:

There is an opportunity for a student to undertake doctoral research at the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing in the University of Birmingham. As part of the COMPAUL project on "The Earliest Commentaries on Paul as Sources for the Biblical Text", a bursary is available for a student to work on the Greek catenae tradition of the Pauline epistles. Candidates should have excellent language skills in biblical Greek: experience of working with manuscripts would be beneficial, as would prior research experience and a Master's degree in a related area.Potential applicants should contact Dr Hugh Houghton, the project's principal investigator, by 2nd February 2013. Please give details of linguistic ability and research experience and attach a brief CV.

Additional information on the project; on ITSEE, and on the PhD advertisement.

For a general introduction by Houghton to the work at the ITSEE you can look at the following videoclip (NB: that it is from April 2012, and does not reflect the latest developments):