Manuscript Hunters – New Website

 Right now I am participating in the launch (via Zoom) of a new website, Manuscript Hunters – the result of a project at the University of Munich with wonderful resources on "manuscript hunters" like Tischendorf, Dunlop-Gibson and Smith-Lewis, Curzon, and many more. There are many fine resources here with timelines, illustrations, bibliographies and other features. The website will be updated continously. 

I have not looked at the website in any detail yet, so I do not know to what degree they have included critical perspectives relating to cultural theft, or (fantastic) discovery stories (see for example Eva Mroczek's article in Marginalia here).

Lady Bible Hunters: Kickass Women

Under labels like “female explorers and kickass women,” Ailsa Ross blogs in Atlas Obscura (20 Jan) about the Scottish twins and biblehunters  Agnes and Margaret Smith.

If you want to know more
Agnes Smith Lewis, In the Shadow of Sinai: A Story of Travel and Research from 1895 to 1897 (Cambridge: Macmillan & Bowes, 1898).

Margaret Dunlop Gibson, How the Codex Was Found : A Narrative of Two Visits to Sinai from Mrs Lewis’s Journals, 1892-1893 (Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press, 2001).

Modern accounts
Allan Whigham Price, The ladies of Castlebrae (London: Headline, 1987).

Janet Soskice, Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels (London: Vintage, 2009).

Here is a video featuring Soskice who tells the story about the two ladies and her own work on the biography.

For earlier posts relating to the sisters and the MSS they discovered, see here, here and here.