Eighth Lincoln College Summer School in Greek Palaeography

Wesley won’t be a lecturer this year

Lincoln College is hosting its 8th Summer School in Greek Palaeography this summer. I highly recommend it. You can read about my experience.

The eighth Lincoln College International Summer School in Greek Palaeography will be held on 27 July - 1 August 2020. The school offers a five-day introduction to the study of Greek manuscripts through ten reading classes, three library visits and five thematic lectures.

Costs: The school does not charge student fees. However, any faculty members admitted to the school may be charged a small fee to defray costs. Participants are individually responsible for their transportation and living expenses in Oxford. A few bursaries, covering housing (but no board), will be awarded to particularly deserving applicants.

Daily schedule: 9:00-11:00 reading class, 11:15-13:00 library visit, 13:00-14:45 lunch break, 14:45-16:45 reading class, 17:00-18:00 lecture. A final written examination will be administered on Saturday 1 August, 9:00-12:00.

Instructors: Georgi R. Parpulov (Ph.D. Chicago), Christos Simelidis (D.Phil. Oxon.), Dimitris Skrekas (D.Phil. Oxon.).

Lecturers: Nigel G. Wilson FBA (Oxford), Prof. Marc Lauxtermann (Oxford), Prof. Leslie Brubaker (Birmingham), Prof. David Parker FBA (Birmingham), Christopher Wright (Cambridge).

More info here. 

7th Lincoln College Summer School of Greek Palaeography

Georgi Parpulov has announced the 7th Lincoln College Summer School of Greek Palaeography.

The school is intended for students of Classics, Patristics, Theology, Biblical or Byzantine Studies. Potential applicants are advised that it only offers introductory-level instruction in Greek palaeography and codicology. Adequate knowledge of Greek is a must for all students.

It is well worth it if you can make it. I would echo what Pete Head says about it, “Highly Recommended (don’t let the fact that it is in Oxford put you off).” I did it several years ago and really enjoyed it. And now you can even pop by Wycliffe Hall during the breaks to make jokes about Oxford with Pete Head! ;)

More info is here. The deadline to apply is January 15, 2018.

Greek Palaeography in Oxford

This is a guest post by Peter Gurry who just came home from the fifth Summer School of Greek Palaeography in Oxford:

* * *

Last week was the fifth Summer School of Greek Palaeography hosted by Lincoln College in Oxford. This year’s program was run by Georgi Parpulov and a small cadre of other instructors.

The program ran for five days and concluded with a review exam on Saturday morning. The students were organized into groups of nine with each group led by a seasoned palaeographer. The majority of time was devoted to deciphering various Greek hands starting with Codex Bezae and quickly jumping to manuscripts from the 8th–15th century (so almost all minuscules). My own group spent time with about 30 manuscripts and I assume most of the other groups were the same. The focus was decidedly on matters of palaeography and codicology, so there was very little translation.

Nigel Wilson giving hands-on instruction at Christ Church library.

The late mornings were spent at either Christ Church library or the Bodleian examining manuscripts of roughly the same time period as in our reading groups. We got to examine a number of Psalters and Gospel books but the highlight was seeing a book of patristic excerpts presented to Queen Mary I (“Bloody Mary”) that had been commissioned by the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. At something like 2.5 feet tall by 2 feet wide, I was told it was the largest Greek book in the Bodleian’s collection.

Georgi Parpulov explaining codices in the Christ Church library.

The evenings were given to lectures from Nigel Wilson (Oxford), Hugh Houghton (University of Birmingham), Ilse de Vos (King’s College London), and Elisabeth Jeffreys (Oxford).

Nigel Wilson opened the series with a lecture on “The Rewards of Palaeography.” The main reward, he said, was filling in some lacuna in our present knowledge by finding previously unknown texts such as the sermons of Origen found a few years ago or the Archimedes Palimpsest, by finding an older copy of a known text, or of correcting the work of previous scholars.

On Tuesday, Hugh Houghton gave an energetic talk on “Digital Editing and the Greek New Testament” that was meant to introduce the work being done on the Editio Critica Maior. He gave a brief overview of the CBGM and noted its role in helping establish the “earliest attainable text” (his term). He also gave us quick demos of the software currently being used at Birmingham to collate MSS and to construct variation units from those collations. If I heard correctly, the collation software is already implemented on the NT.VMR website, but this was the first I’ve seen of the additional software that they are using to demarcate variation units. One interesting feature I noted was that the software displays a warning message whenever the editor combines variants into a variation unit in such a way that it misrepresents one of the witnesses in that particular unit. It all looked quite impressive in the demo and I’m eager to know more about how it works. I was also interested to learn from Houghton that there are already plans to build a fresh version of the CBGM software at Birmingham as well. It will be worth watching to see what innovations such a project might produce; might we finally see a version that will allow others to construct their own local stemmata? Whether or not we can hope for such a development, there is clearly a very fruitful collaboration happening between text critics and computer scientists at Birmingham and we can all hope that continues. In all, I think Houghton did a great job presenting some of the developments happening in our discipline to text critics working on other texts. I left with the feeling that now is an exciting time to be working in this field.

On Thursday night, Ilse de Vos spoke to us on “Dealing with an Abundant Textual Tradition,” a talk which introduced us to her editorial work on the Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem. This collection of 137 questions and answers about Christianity is extant in some 250 witnesses in Greek, Latin, Church Slavonic, Arabic, and several other languages. What caught my attention was how helpful she has found phylogenetic methods to be especially in tracing the textual transmission of the Quaestiones. Although she hasn’t been able to root her phylogenetic tree yet, she has been able to identify a number of different manuscript groupings and even to connect some of these groups to various translations. For her this has raised the question of whether her critical edition should focus on reconstructing the original Greek text of the Quaestiones or should instead focus on the Greek text from which some of the more interesting translations were made.

A Psalter

The final lecture was given on Thursday evening by Elisabeth Jeffreys on “Editorial Problems in Byzantine Homilies.” Jeffreys is currently working on an edition of the homilies of James of Kokkinobaphos which exists in two remarkably similar copies, often agreeing with each other even at the level of punctuation. It struck me as a good example of the kind of skill Byzantine scribes could achieve.

The week gave me a much greater respect for the discipline of palaeography and a much better sense of how such work is conducted. Particularly with the Byzantine period where so many dated manuscripts are extant, I can see little reason for skepticism about the dates offered by those who specialize in this discipline. All-in-all it was a great week and I would highly recommend that those interested in textual criticism take part the next time around. Many thanks to Georgi Parpulov and the other instructors for putting on such a valuable course.

Lincoln College Summer School of Greek Palaeography

Highly Recommended (don’t let the fact that it is in Oxford put you off):

The fifth Lincoln College International Summer School in Greek Palaeography will be held on 28 July-2 August 2014. The school offers a five-day introduction to the study of Greek manuscripts through ten reading classes, four library visits and five thematic lectures.

More details here. For a report from an earlier summer school see here.

Report from the Lincoln College (Oxford) International Summer School in Greek Palaeography

The past five days have been a whirlwind introduction to, and saturation in the discipline of Greek Palaeography. Each day began with a Seminar led by Dr. Niels Gaul (Lincoln) in which the basic issues of Greek palaeography were introduced. The day then consisted of about 5 hours of reading Greek manuscripts (some 170 samples were read!), with a one hour tutorial sandwiched somewhere in between. The tutors were Dr. Niels Gaul, Dr. Christos Simelidis (Dumbarton Oaks), and Dr. Timothy Janz (Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana). In the evenings, public lectures were given by Nigel Wilson, Peter Schreiner, Claudia Rupp, Timothy Janz, and Elizabeth Jeffreys, respectively. The two best (in my opinion) lectures were those of Wilson (Greek Palaeography & Textual Criticism) and Jeffreys (Post-Byzantine and Renaissance Greek Manuscripts), the opening and closing lectures.

Wilson's was helpful for our blog because of the emphasis he placed on palaeography for doing textual criticism. He began with a somewhat humorous quip that palaeography was made necessary by the dishonesty of theologians, and that textual criticism's necessity is due to the same. But his lecture focused on real problems in critical texts of classical authors in which the editors of the respective texts made faulty judgments on readings that, through palaeography, could be shown to be misunderstood. It was a perfect lecture to begin the week (for me at least), and provided the impetus for focused study throughout. He (and others) lamented the fact that many young scholars these days are 'doing textual criticism' without understanding palaeography. What is more sad is that younger scholars are reading manuals on textual criticism, and then simply regurgitating what they've read after memorising the most common text critical vocabulary (homoioteleuton, itacism, etc.), rather than having ever gained a familiarity with the actual manuscripts themselves. It became clear over the course of the week that only by spending hours engaged in reading and evaluating manuscripts can one truly understand what types of scribal errors come about, how they come about, and what possible solutions exist for the text critic. If one never spends time with the manuscripts, apart from the vastly different perfectly printed fonts in the editions, s/he may only scratch the surface of doing solid textual work.

I would suspect that the most respected text critics that we all read and admire have spent many, many hours with real manuscripts. Just as one cannot be proficient in languages simply by studying grammars without actually reading texts, so one cannot be proficient in textual criticism by reading manuals with no exposure to real material. I would simply close with the encouragement to all of us to spend more and more time with actual material. If you are near a good library where you can get your hands (clean ones of course!) on real manuscripts, do so for your own good. If not, you can get your hands on some good collections that provide samples with transcriptions, and begin practicing your own diplomatic transcriptions.

For Greek palaeography and manuscripts, I'll leave you with several good places to start. I would be grateful if someone could also provide some similar resources for Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Coptic (and anything else, I suppose!):

Intros:

V. Gardthausen, Griechische Palaeographie (Leipzig, 1913 (2nd))
B. van Groningen, Short Manual of Greek Palaeography (Leiden, 1940)
A. Mioni, Introduzione alla paleografia greca (Padua, 1973)

Mss samples:

E. Gamillscheg and D. Harlfinger (eds.), Repertorium der
griechischen Kopisten, 800-1600:

1. Handschriften aus Bibliotheken Großbritanniens (Vienna,
1981)
2. Handschriften aus Bibliotheken Frankreichs und Nachträge
zu den Bibliotheken Großbritanniens (Vienna, 1989)
3. Handschriften aus Bibliotheken Roms mit dem Vatikan
(Vienna, 1997)
4. Handschriften aus Bibliotheken Belgiens, Deutschlands,
der Niederlande, Österreichs und der Schweiz (forthcoming)

M. Vogel and V. Gardthausen, Die griechischen Schreiber des
Mittelalters und der Renaissance (Leizig, 1909, reprint Hildesheim,
1966)

K. & S. Lake, Dated Greek Minuscule Manuscripts to the
Year 1200 (10 vols., Boston, Ma., 1934-1939). Index (Boston,
1945)
N. Wilson, Medieval Greek Bookhands. Examples selected
from Greek manuscripts in Oxford Libraries (2 vols., Cambridge,
Mass., 1972/3, reprinted 1995)
R. Barbour, Greek Literary Hands ad 400-1600 (Oxford,
1981)
P. Franchi de Cavalieri and I. Lietzmann (eds), Specimina Codicum
Graecorum Vaticanorum (Berlin-Leipzig, 1929)
E. Follieri, Codices graeci Bibliothecae Vaticanae selecti(Exempla Scripturarum, 4) (Vatican City, 1969)
P. Canart, A. Jacob, S. Lucà , and L. Perria, (eds) Facsimili di codici
greci della Biblioteca Vaticana (Exempla Scripturarum, 5)
(Vatican City, 1998)
A. Turyn, Codices graeci Vaticani saeculis XIII et XIV
scripti annorumque notis instructi (Vatican City, 1964)
E. Mioni and M. Formentin (eds), I codici greci in minuscola dei secoli
IX e X della Boblioteca Nazionale Marciana (Padua, 1975)
A. Turyn, Dated Greek Manuscripts of the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth Centuries in the Libraries of Italy (2 vols., Urbana-
Chicago-London, 1972)