Cats, Bibles and More at the British Library

Over the weekend, I made a trip to the British Library and got to see an amazing exhibit: Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War. This exhibition is open until 19 February 2019 and features some amazing manuscripts:

Treasures from the British Library’s own collection, including the beautifully illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels, Beowulf and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, sit alongside stunning finds from Sutton Hoo and the Staffordshire Hoard. The world-famous Domesday Book offers its unrivalled depiction of the landscape of late Anglo-Saxon England while Codex Amiatinus, a giant Northumbrian Bible taken to Italy in 716, returns to England for the first time in 1300 years.

Here is a 30-second promo for the exhibition:



As exciting as that exhibition is, I am sure that all of our readers would be interested in another exhibition, Cats on the Page, because who doesn’t love cats? This one is free, and best of all, if you are coming to the UK for the Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (4–6 March 2019), you can make it to this exhibition. It is open until 17 March 2019.

Source: I took this photo
(no photography permitted in the exhibit)

To be clear, Cats on the Page did not feature any manuscripts with paw prints on them, but the British Library’s Medieval Manuscripts Blog has a recent post about those manuscripts, with several images. There is also this book, if you need more cats and manuscripts. The exhibition did feature an anti-witchcraft pamphlet from around 1579 with something about a cat in it. There were also a few bizarre recordings that you could listen to, including one of a musical duet featuring two singers meowing at each other, and another that was just sounds of a cat hissing. Fun for children though, for sure.

Does anyone know if there are any manuscripts of the Bible with cat prints on them? Has CSNTM digitised any?

I went to the Cats on the Page exhibit mainly because we had to wait a little while before we could go to the Anglo-Saxon exhibit (and also because cats). If you only have time for one—as much as I’m sure you would be tempted to see the cat exhibit, you should definitely skip it in order to see Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War.

We booked our tickets to Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms on the train on the way down, and it had sold out by the time we arrived at the British Library. It truly is an amazing exhibit. If you are remotely in the area, it is absolutely worth a trip. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It took me over an hour to get through, and that was because I had to rush through a lot of it due to having two small children with us. I could have easily spent two hours or longer there.

The exhibition has some of the “greatest hits” of manuscripts connected to the British Isles from way back when. You are met in the first room with The St. Augustine Gospels, one of the books Augustine of Canterbury brought with him on his mission to the English in 597. Other famous Bibles on exhibit include the Lindisfarne Gospels, the St. Cuthbert Gospel, the Harley Golden Gospels, the Coronation Gospels, the Utrecht Psalter, and its copy, the Harley Psalter, the **massive** Codex Amiatinus. There are even a couple of folios of purple parchment from the Stockholm Codex Aureus. You can imagine how I was about as excited as a 4-year-old in a candy store when I turned the corner to see purple parchment. The mood was somewhat dampered when my actual 4-year-old decided to argue with me on the grounds that it was more reddish than purple. In the end, I conceded her point.

Codex Amiatinus (good stuff from the BL here) is especially significant. It was produced at Wearmouth-Jarrow (up near Newcastle) in the early 8th-century—one of three massive single-volume Bibles. It is the only one that has survived, and this is the first time it’s been back to Britain in 1300 years, having been excellently cared-for in Italy through the centuries. What I was shocked to see, however, was that in the middle of the room a few feet from Codex Amiatinus was a less-imposing display of a few pages. These were the Middleton leaves (BL, Add Ms 45025)—some of the few folios that remain of one of the other two volumes made with Codex Amiatinus. Not only do we have Codex Amiatinus in Britiain for the first time in 1300 years, but we have it on display next to the remains of one of its two siblings.

St. Cuthbert Gospel;
source: Wikipedia (but I saw it with
my own eyes and this is really it)

There is also an element of shock to see the tiny St. Cuthbert Gospel and the massive Codex Amiatinus next to each other. Two copies of the Scriptures made near to each other in time and location, yet their outward appearances look nothing alike.

The exhibition features not just biblical manuscripts, either. You can also see the only copy of Beowulf, the earliest copy of the Rule of St. Benedict, and the Great Domesday Book (as well as the Exon Domesday). A number of non-book items are of interest as well, but again, I had to rush through parts of it.

Perhaps one my unexpected favourites of the exhibition was another manuscript. I will post more on it tomorrow morning as it deserves its own discussion.

My only criticism (and I feel guilty for having any criticism at all for this excellent exhibit) is that I would have liked to see f. 1 of BL, Cotton MS Titus C XV. The other four folios are from the 6th-century purple codex N022, but f. 1 has a papyrus fragment of Gregory the Great’s Forty Homilies on the Gospels in Latin that dates right to around the time of the composition of the work itself. Robert Babcock wrote a delightful article a few years ago in which he identified the fragment and speculated (reasonably in my opinion) that it might have been one of the other books Augustine of Canterbury brought with him to Britain in 597. It would have been nice to see it next to the St. Augustine Gospels (though there is a nice image of the fragment on p. 21 of the exhibition catalogue).

It is also always a treat to see some of the treasures of the British Library that are on permanent display, like Codex Sinaiticus, the earliest complete copy of the New Testament.

In summary, drop what you’re doing and go see this amazing exhibit, but be sure to book in advance.

More to come tomorrow.

Maurizio Aceto and Scientific Analysis of Manuscripts

The John Rylands Library is running an exhibit through August 2018 called The Alchemy of Colour. They even have a series of short YouTube videos describing non-invasive ways that multi-spectral analysis can shed new light on manuscripts. The videos are a delight to watch.

One of the videos shows that cow’s urine was used for a particular yellow pigment—demonstrated by a yellow dress glowing under the blacklight. It sounds almost scandalous, but if you are familiar with ancient recipes for making inks and dyes, it really is no surprise. Earle Radcliffe Caley’s 1926 translation of P.Leiden X, for example, has six references to urine as an ingredient. The video that excited me, however, was a short discussion of the colour purple:



In the video, Cheryl Porter gives a great description of some of the ways purple was made and the significance the colour had in antiquity. She mentions specifically that purple was often equated with power. That has led some to suspect that purple Gospel books could have had political significance.

Rather than a discussion of the colour purple, however, I wanted to use the opportunity afforded by the video to point readers to some of the work being done by Maurizio Aceto. You might ask why Aceto appears in a video about the use of purple in manuscripts, especially because he doesn’t say anything about the colour.

Photo credit: John Rylands Library Special Collections Blog,
“Purple is the new black“ (2 November 2017)

The reason is that Aceto has published several articles in recent years on the use of non-invasive scientific testing to learn about ancient artefacts, and purple codices have been subjects of a number of them. In one of his publications (“First Analytical Evidences of Precious Colourants on Mediterranean Illuminated Manuscripts“), he and a team of researchers used Raman spectroscopy, X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) and UV-Vis diffuse reflectance spectrophotometry with fibre optics (FORS) to identify the inks and colourants in the Vienna Dioscurides and Vienna Genesis manuscripts of the sixth century.

In another study (“Non-Invasive Investigation on a VI Century Purple Codex from Brescia, Italy”), Aceto led a team of researchers who used XRF, FORS and a couple of other non-invasive techniques on Codex Brixianus, a sixth-century Latin purple codex. This second article I mention was especially interesting, as Aceto et al. demonstrate that Tyrian Purple was not the main source of the purple dye, but they suggest that the codex might have been dyed by a process known as top-dyeing. The parchment was first dyed with a cheaper purple substitute, and then a thin layer of more expensive Tyrian purple was added on top of the lesser-quality dye. It was a way to save money without completely losing the colour of the more expensive dye. (Let me add that his suggestion about the possibility of top-dyeing applies only to Codex Brixianus, not necessarily to the Greek purple codices from the same era.)

I give the information for some of Aceto’s publications below. If you like manuscripts and dabble in science (or vice versa), they are interesting reads. Scientists like Aceto have a whole toolbox of equipment that can be used to study manuscripts that easily goes unnoticed by scholars concerned with the texts those manuscripts contain. Besides, science is fun!

Sources 

Aceto, Maurizio, Angelo Agostino, Gaia Fenoglio, Pietro Baraldi, P. Zannini, C. Hofmann, and E. Gamillscheg. “First Analytical Evidences of Precious Colourants on Mediterranean Illuminated Manuscripts.” Spectrochim. Acta A 95 (September 2012): 235–45.

Aceto, Maurizio, Angelo Agostino, Enrico Boccaleri, and Anna Cerutti Garlanda. “The Vercelli Gospels Laid Open: An Investigation into the Inks Used to Write the Oldest Gospels in Latin.” X-Ray Spectrometry 37 (2008): 286–292.

Aceto, Maurizio, Ambra Idone, Angelo Agostino, Gaia Fenoglio, Monica Gulmini, Pietro Baraldi, and Fabrizio Crivello. “Non-Invasive Investigation on a VI Century Purple Codex from Brescia, Italy.” Spectrochim. Acta A 117 (January 3, 2014): 34–41.

Aceto, Maurizio, Angelo Agostino, Gaia Fenoglio, Ambra Idone, Fabrizio Crivello, Martina Griesser, Franz Kirchweger, Katharina Uhlir, and Patricia Roger Puyo. “Analytical Investigations on the Coronation Gospels Manuscript.” Spectrochim. Acta A 171 (January 15, 2017): 213–21.

New Contributor: Elijah Hixson

When I first started learning about textual criticism at seminary, textual criticism was not much more than one lecture on Romans 5:1 in intermediate Greek, and if you were lucky, an introductory course that was only taught once every few years. I had to wait a few years for the introductory course. My intermediate Greek professor pointed me to Metzger and Ehrman’s Text of the New Testament. After that, I found this blog and never stopped reading it. It was like drinking from a fire hose at first, but I am deeply thankful for all the posts and comments here over the years that have helped make me who I am. It is an honour to be a contributor to this blog.

I recently finished my PhD at the University of Edinburgh under Paul Foster. James Snapp recently interviewed me about this research over at his blog, The Text of the Gospels, but I will give a summary of my research and results here. Like Alan Taylor Farnes, I too decided to test the “singular readings method”. Whereas Farnes did that with Abschriften, I took a closer look at the sixth-century purple codices 022, 023 and 042. Because these three manuscripts were copied from the same exemplar, I reconstructed the text of their exemplar in Matthew’s Gospel where that was possible.

Now, I know that scholars like Royse, Hernández and just about everyone else who uses the method are careful to qualify it—singular readings really tell us about the “complex scribe” not the actual scribe. Still, after a lengthy discussion of the matter, Royse concludes that the singulars are probably due to the actual scribe in most of the cases. His words are:

In what follows, consequently, I will speak of a manuscript’s “scribe” in the ordinary way, that is, meaning the person who actually wrote the manuscript. Discussions of the scribe’s handwriting or corrections, for instance, will obviously refer to this one person. And most of the singulars should, without doubt, be attributed to this person. (p. 55)

In nuce, singular readings hypothetically could be from anyone, but they’re probably the work of the actual person who made the manuscript. If anything, singular readings tell us about the activity of the person who made the manuscript with some contamination from previous scribes in the line of transmission back to the archetype.

But is that really true?

By focusing on singular readings, one could include inherited readings from the exemplar and exclude non-singular readings created by the scribe. Those possibilities allow errors on both sides of the data. I set out to test the method in a three-tiered approach.

First, I went to all the places in Matthew where 022, 023 and 042 are all extant and compared orthography (ει/ι and αι/ε interchanges), unit delimitation, kephalaia and titloi, the Eusebian apparatus and textual changes. This comparison allowed me to build a preliminary profile of each scribe to help resolve issues reconstructing the exemplar later one where only two of the three manuscripts were extant. For example, the scribe of 023 is incredible and makes very few changes, but the scribe of 042 has a noticeable tendency to harmonise Matthew to Markan parallels. Therefore, if only 023 and 042 are extant—and they differ—, and one of the possibilities is that 023 preserves the text of the exemplar and 042 harmonises to Mark, then that is probably what happened (as opposed to 042 preserving the text of the exemplar and 023 making the change).

Second, I analysed the singular and family readings of each manuscript (readings unique to these three manuscripts). I did this to include “inherited singulars”. Of course, the inherited readings aren’t singular in my cases, but that is only because we have more than one copy of the exemplar. Stated alternatively for 022, I studied the singular readings of 022 as we would count them if 023 and 042 never existed. This modification best replicates the situation for any other early manuscript, like the early papyri studied by Royse.

Third, I reconstructed the 022-023-042 exemplar, analysed the changes each scribe made to the text and compared these numbers with what I got from the modified singular readings method.

The results? An analysis of singular (and family) readings of 022, 023 and 042 does not give accurate conclusions about the scribes who made them. In fact, if you add up the total number of singular and family readings from the three manuscripts, about two-thirds of them are inherited readings, not scribal creations. If you add up the total number of scribal changes in all three manuscripts, about two-thirds of them are non-singular. Instead of getting the habits of the actual scribe with a bit of contamination from the complex scribe, with the purple codices, the unique readings tell us more about the “habits” of the complex scribe with a bit of contamination from the person who actually wrote the words. I wonder if even that is accurate because of how many non-singular scribal changes went unnoticed.

Even though the method doesn’t “work” with 022, 023 and 042, it still might tell us something about scribal habits in the early manuscripts. Several of the changes I saw were instances in which scribes aligned the text to what would become the majority reading, and I don’t think that would be the case for the early papyri—certainly not as much. I’m not saying to throw the method out. It still tells us how manuscripts are unique, even if in these three instances it fails to tell us about scribes.

In the end, the project was a lot of fun. I learned a lot about three sixth-century witnesses to Matthew’s Gospel and their scribes. The manuscripts themselves are gorgeous—they were a good choice of manuscripts to spend 3.5 years looking at. I also highly recommend Byzantine manuscripts to people looking for thesis topics. Even though I am not a Byzantine prioritist myself (though I have the highest respect for our Silver-Haired Assassin), it is exciting to notice new things by working with manuscripts that have been largely neglected since their discovery and initial publication.

Codex Sinopensis (O 023) Online

The following is another guest post from Elijah Hixson. He is currently writing a PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh on the NT purple codices about which Jerome famously said, “parchmens are dyed purple, gold is melted into lettering, manuscripts are decked with jewels, while Christ lies at the door naked and dying” (Epist. 22.32).

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The Bibliothèque nationale de France have just made some very nice, high-quality images of (most of) Codex Sinopensis available! The manuscript is gorgeous and worth a look.

Codex Sinopensis (O 023), f. 8v.

Codex Sinopensis (Paris, BnF supp. gr. 1286; O 023) is a 6th-century manuscript of Matthew’s Gospel. It is one of the purple codices—deluxe manuscripts written in gold and silver inks on parchment that has been dyed purple (on Codex Rossanensis, one of the other 6th-century purple codices, see here). Codex Sinopensis is especially magnificent, because it was written entirely in gold ink, and there are five extant miniatures painted right into the pages of the Gospel. These are some of the earliest examples of Christian art in manuscripts. Art historians know this manuscript well, and its well-trained scribe was probably in his or her prime. There are very few mistakes and corrections in this manuscript, compared to its two siblings.

Its text is not especially exciting; Codex Sinopensis has an early form of what will become the Byzantine text. What is more exciting than its text is its textual relationship with two other purple codices, N 042 and Σ 042. These three manuscripts were all copied from the same exemplar. Back in 2015 at the SBL Annual Meeting in Atlanta, I presented a paper on Codex Sinopensis and its close relationship with its two siblings as a way to test the singular readings method of determining scribal habits (summarised here).

If my quick count of the newly available images is correct, the new images include 41 of the 43 folios at the BnF, but they also include images of the lost leaf from Ukraine. Shortly after Henri Omont published the editio princeps of the 43 Paris leaves, Prof. Dmitry Aynalov sent a photograph of a 44th leaf, which was in the custody of a gymnasium (the equivalent of American high school) in Mariupol, Ukraine. The leaf has been lost since at least 1966, when Kurt Treu could only write that it was formerly in Mariupol and to my knowledge, the leaf has never resurfaced. Now, however, the BnF has digitised their black/white photograph of the lost leaf, which is grounds for rejoicing.

The two pages I could not find on Gallica are folios 11 and 30, but both of those folios include miniatures, and images of the painted sides are readily available all over the internet. Realistically, that leaves 11v and 30r as the only pages of Codex Sinopensis that are still only accessible through Omont’s pseudo-facsimile in the editio princeps. Of course, Muphy’s Law would correctly predict that if one is writing a doctoral thesis on Codex Sinopensis, one would encounter a discrepancy on f. 30r, line 9 about which the editio princeps is unclear, but that is another story.

The images are posted at Gallica (gallica.bnf.fr). The easiest way to find them, however, is through the links to each folio/bifolio at http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc24356w.

Codex Rossanensis Restored

The following is a guest post from Elijah Hixson. Elijah is currently writing his doctoral thesis on Codex Rossanensis and two other purple codices at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Paul Foster. When I saw last week that Rossenansis had recently be restored I asked Elijah if he would give us a quick intro to the manuscript. Enjoy!

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Great news! Codex Rossanensis has been restored! It should be back on display in the Diocesan Museum in Rossano, Calabria, Italy by now. Codex Rossanensis is a sixth-century Greek purple Gospels manuscript included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. A recent article at The Realm of History by Dattatreya Mandal about Codex Rossanensis has been circulating online, and in light of the recent restoration of the manuscript, now seems to be a good opportunity to say a few words about this gorgeous treasure of Calabria.

Christ as the Good Samaritan, Codex Rossanensis, f. 7v

The Realm of History article includes some excellent photos of Codex Rossanensis. From the photos, one need not wonder why Codex Rossanensis is known as one of the “purple codices”. These manuscripts were written in silver and/or gold ink on parchment that has been dyed purple. Purple dye was expensive, and the rich purple is a striking background against which the silver and gold inks glisten in the light. Even as the silver begins to tarnish, the words of the Gospels still radiate from their pages.