Romantic Love

One might argue that western ideas of romantic love have their roots in certain ideas of the Renaissance, when the Roman poet Ovid was re-interpreted through a Christian lens and seen as a harbinger of courtly and noble love. In fact, Ovid was probably just a Boris Johnson of ancient Rome, a public school cad with a gift for words, and not a person particularly worth following.

The Vatican Library has just digitized an Epistulae of Ovid drawn ca. 1430-1440, possibly in northern Italy, which depicts in its margins ten pairs of lovers framing the start of each letter (see article by Rabel).

Leaf through Ross.893 to see them. Here for example is Leander of Abydos clutching the M of "Mittit Abydenus ..." like a shield as he writes in Heroides Letter 18 of his desire to swim long distance to see his girlfriend:

You can also admire him wearing a most extraordinary Italian Renaissance high hat as letter 19 arrives by return of post from lovely Hero:

Here is the full list of 32 digitizations uploaded on July 5, 2016:

1. Borg.copt.109.cass.IX.fasc.29 - Details
2. Borg.copt.109.cass.XIX.fasc.71 - Details
3. Borg.copt.109.cass.XIX.fasc.74 - Details
4. Borg.copt.109.cass.XVII.fasc.62 - Details
5. Borg.copt.109.cass.XVII.fasc.63 - biblical fragments including a page of Luke's Gospel - Details
6. Borg.copt.109.cass.XVIII.fasc.65.1 - Details
7. Borg.copt.109.cass.XVIII.fasc.66 - Details
8. Borg.copt.109.cass.XVIII.fasc.67 - Details
9. Borg.copt.109.cass.XVIII.fasc.68 - Details
10. Chig.H.VII.229 - Horace - Details
11. Ott.lat.3382 -historical? Armenia and Persia - Details
12. Ross.893 - Ovid, Epistulae (above) - Details
13. Urb.lat.679 - Rambaldi's commentary on Dante's Divine Comedy Details
14. Vat.lat.101 - glossed bible, later books Details
15. Vat.lat.293 - Ambrose, Details
16. Vat.lat.309 - John of Damascus, attrib. Details
17. Vat.lat.310 - John of Damascus, Chrysostom, Anselm - Details
18. Vat.lat.331 - Jerome on prophets, Details
19. Vat.lat.351 - Collection of Epistulae, Details
20. Vat.lat.652 - Johannes Scotus Eriugena and his famed exposition on the heavenly hierarchy, from which derives our modern use of "hierarchy" as a key abstraction - Details
21. Vat.lat.669 - Bernard of Clairvaux, Details
22. Vat.lat.687 - Augustine plus bits and bobs including this nifty circular calendar for 1401 onwards,
    
    
23. Vat.lat.690 - Peter Lombard, Sententiae Details
24. Vat.lat.699 - Psalms commentary attributed to Innocent III - Details
25. Vat.lat.708 - Albertus Magnus, bishop Regensburg, Summae theologiae, Details
26. Vat.lat.753 - Details
27. Vat.lat.794 - 14th century copy of Thomas Aquinas commentary on gospels. It seems from notes in it that Bermond de Montferrier, a Montpellier law professor was involved in transferring the codex to a convent in that city. With fine initial (below) showing the angelic doctor - Details
    
28. Vat.lat.812 - Franciscan sermons Details
29. Vat.lat.828 - works of Aegidius Romanus Details
30. Vat.lat.856 - Henry of Ghent, 15th century, first exemplar? Details
31. Vat.lat.12504 - letters of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, humanist, diplomat and pope, Details
32. Vat.lat.14741 - Giorgio Grippari's 1694 handwritten list of the printed books in the Biblioteca Vaticana. This is only initial letters A-B. Details

This is Piggin's Unofficial List 58. 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.

New BAV Portal

The Vatican's launch of a new portal for the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana reached maturity July 4 when the portal, which had been slowly filling since May, finally surpassed the old site in its posted total of content, reaching 4,724 items with the addition of thirty Hebrew manuscripts.

The numbers may still by slightly out of whack, with some subtotals not up to the old site's levels, but I would say that now is the time to change your links, begin using the new portal, and grin and bear its inadequacies. I have already built a whole new suite of searches with scripts to monitor it, and will no longer be monitoring the old site from now on.

Here is the full list of novelties, with notes taken from Malachi Beit-Arié's codicological descriptions:

1. Neofiti.4, Details
2. Neofiti.7, Details
3. Neofiti.9, Details
4. Neofiti.11, Details
5. Neofiti.14, Details
6. Neofiti.15, Details
7. Neofiti.22, Details
8. Neofiti.23, Details
9. Neofiti.24, Details
10. Neofiti.30, Details
11. Neofiti.31, Details
12. Neofiti.32, Details
13. Neofiti.34, Details
14. Neofiti.36, Details
15. Neofiti.40, Details
16. Neofiti.41, Details
17. Neofiti.43, Details
18. Neofiti.44, Details
19. Neofiti.45, Details
20. Neofiti.46, Details
21. Ross.328, Hebrew Details
22. Ross.359, Hebrew Details
23. Ross.362, Hebrew Details
24. Ross.363, Hebrew Details
25. Ross.436, Mahzor, Roman rite. Italy, about 1400. Details
26. Ross.477, Canon (Book II, Fens 1–2) by Avicenna, in the translation of Nathan ha-Meati. Details
27. Ross.599, Sefer Mizvot Gadol by Moses b. Jacob of Coucy. Incomplete. Details
28. Ross.601, Pentateuch, Former Prophets and treatises in Hebrew, written out by scribe Joseph b. Jacob ibn Janah in Huesca, Spain in 1275. Details
29. Ross.883, Hayyim b. Joseph Vital's kabbalistic work Ozerot Hayyim in an 18th-century Italian manuscript with this concentric diagram at fol. 1v. Details
    
30. Ross.1015, Genesis i:1–xxvi:32. Probably copied by a Christian hand. Details

This is Piggin's Unofficial List 57. 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.

Storm on a Pie Chart

Longtime German infographics company Globus has just re-released an entertaining pie-chart graphic from 1962 which harks back to the day when travelling outside your home country for a vacation was rather a foreign idea, but the economic miracle had creating this new option for middle-income Germans.

The artwork shows a German man in the inevitable Roman sandals smirking on a lounger with a Chianti wickerwork bottle next to him (Italy was the place Germans adored visiting). The graph says: "Per 100 adults in West Germany, 32 plan a holiday abroad this year," and offers a breakdown of why: better weather (8%); to meet foreigners (8%); see foreign sights (4%); it's cheaper (4%); get away from the same-old (4%); other (4%). The source of the survey data is not given.

-- dpa-infografik GmbH

Look closely for what has happened to the rest of the pie: it has vanished into a storm-cloud. Probably an allusion to the summer thunderstorms enjoyed by the stay-at-homes. Incomplete pies are not so common in infographics, but the artist took this liberty because pies were and still are common and familiar in German information visualization.

The art was released in 1962 with the ironic strapline: "Every third adult German wants to shake the dust of West Germany from their feet in the 1962 holiday season. But why? Are the attractions of Germany really used up? (Jeder dritte erwachsene Deutsche will im Urlaubsjahr 1962 den Staub der Bundesrepublik von seinen Füßen schütteln. Warum? Sind die Schönheiten Deutschlands schon allzu bekannt?)

A subtext that is not mentioned: East Germans were mostly forbidden to travel abroad. The Berlin Wall had just gone up. In later years they were able to visit Hungary and the Black Sea.

A Digital Library is a Tin Box

A digital library looks wonderful on screen, but did you ever wonder what the physical server looks like? A US company has published images of the servers it installed at the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana for the new virtual library, and yes, they look like nothing more than a big black tin box:

Read the Panduit brochure for more information on the energy demands and cooling requirements of this installation in a secure room at the Vatican.

Of course the stacks of the library where the manuscripts are stored are not exactly beautiful to look at either. I have not seen them myself, but a blogger has photographed BAV posters showing them to consist of a great many rolling bookshelves under a bare concrete ceiling:

So now you know what goes on behind the scenes.

Trithemius, Graphic-Minded Historian

Tabulated chronicles have a special place in the history of infographics, since they convert a story into a semi-graph. They tabulate events so that our human vision can make sense of what normally has to be handled by human aural comprehension. A timeline may look natural and obvious to the reader, but is in fact the product of a great deal of research and arranging.

Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), the pioneering literary historian, gets a prized place as the introductory figure at the start of Anthony Grafton's and Megan Hale Williams' Christianity and the transformation of the book: Origen, Eusebius and the library of Caesarea, a book that is a favorite of every classics+graphics reader.

He is important to the evolution of infographics because he thought tables and indices were not just "back-matter" but really do matter. On his outstanding work, I will quote from a Hill exhibition catalog:

The Annales of Hirsau, finished in 1514 ... was Trithemius’ greatest achievement as an historian. The work was commissioned in 1495 by Abbot Blasius of the monastery at Hirsau but proved to be a slow and complex undertaking. [His theory of history was] embraced by the Christian humanists, among whom Trithemius was a major figure [via the Wayback Machine].

Trithemius offered his readers different views of the same material so they could literally "figure it out": a narrative, an index, and an arrangement of all the events in date order in his autograph second recension (1514) which is online at the Bavarian State Library in Munich. Grafton/Hale see it as a modern beacon pointing back to inventions by Eusebius and Origen.

Complementing the Munich codices now is the first recension Trithemius wrote by his own hand 1495-1503, which lacks the tables, but opens with an index:

This famous first edition, Pal. lat. 929, part of the Vatican collection, has arrived online in the last few days thanks to the efforts of a program in Heidelberg, Germany to digitize the Pal. lat. collection. Here is the list of eight novelties (whereby Trithemius was on the tail of the last group, but I overlooked it at first):

1. Pal. lat. 745 Infortiatum (14. Jh.)
2. Pal. lat. 746 Infortiatum (13. Jh.)
3. Pal. lat. 749 Digestum novum (14. Jh.)
4. Pal. lat. 750 Digestum novum (13.-14. Jh.)
5. Pal. lat. 751 Digestum novum (13.-14. Jh.)
6. Pal. lat. 752 Digestum novum (13.-14. Jh.)
7. Pal. lat. 753 Digestum novum (13. Jh.)
8. Pal. lat. 929 Trithemius, Johannes: Chronicon insigne monasterii Hirsaugiensis ordinis S. Benedicti (Sponheim, 1495-1503)

This is Piggin's Unofficial List 56. 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.

Language of Jesus

Half of this week's 98 DigitaVaticana digitizations are books in various forms of Aramaic, famously the language spoken by Jesus. In scholarship and librarianship, old manuscripts in Aramaic are described as "Syriac," whereby as far as I know no especial connection to Syria or to a particular Syriac-liturgy church is intended. It's simply from the classical Latin word for Aramaic.

Aramaic was once spoken over vast swatches of the Middle East, has many dialects and has left "Syriac" liturgical and literary texts which are so antiquated as to be unintelligible to most of the dwindling number of speakers of modern colloquial Aramaic.

The latest round of digitizations (which began June 20 and was completed June 22) brings the posted total to 4,708 manuscripts. The count on the new front page of the portal is currently just 4,595. Actual availability is somewhere between those two numbers. About a third of the following list was triggering "Client Error" when I put up this post, but this can only get better.

You will notice that I am now doing extra work for you, dear reader, processing the links so that the first link leads directly to the manuscript front page while the "Details" link leads to a catalog page.

Obtaining permalinks to specific manuscript page remains a major headache, as one now has to guess them. The method involves noting the folio number, doubling it, adding 6 and converting it to a three-digit format, then writing it on the end of the URL, testing it, correcting it, etc. No fun.

[Late add: Digi has just added a JPEG download button which you can now creatively mis-use to discover the permalink with less effort. On a page you want to refer to, press the JPEG icon, then hover over the "Download" button and you will see the page number in the browser's status bar.]

1. Borg.ar.129, Details,
2. Borg.ebr.3, Details,
3. Borg.ebr.4, Details,
4. Borg.ebr.10, Details,
5. Borg.ebr.12, Details,
6. Borg.ebr.13, Details,
7. Borg.ebr.20, Details,
8. Borg.sir.28, Details,
9. Borg.sir.67, Details,
10. Borg.sir.74, Details,
11. Borg.sir.93, Details,
12. Borg.sir.112, Details,
13. Borg.sir.117, Details,
14. Borg.sir.160, Details,
15. Borg.sir.169, Details,
16. Chig.R.VI.37, an early 15th century-Hebrew bible, Details,
17. Ott.gr.14.pt.2, Details,
18. Reg.lat.1988, Vergil's Georgics in a Renaissance manuscript with this opening. Details.
    
    
19. Ross.604, Seneca, with this opening. Details
    
20. Urb.ebr.59, Details,
21. Urb.gr.82, key manuscript of Geography of Ptolemy, full blog post separately - Details,
22. Urb.gr.149, Details,
23. Vat.ar.32, Details,
24. Vat.ar.158, Details,
25. Vat.ar.317, Details,
26. Vat.copt.1, Details,
27. Vat.copt.6, Details,
28. Vat.ebr.17, Details,
29. Vat.ebr.151, Details,
30. Vat.ebr.152, Details,
31. Vat.ebr.153, Details,
32. Vat.ebr.154, Details,
33. Vat.ebr.155, Details,
34. Vat.ebr.157, Details,
35. Vat.ebr.159, Details,
36. Vat.ebr.168, Details,
37. Vat.ebr.169, Hebrew divorce bills, 15th century. Details.
38. Vat.ebr.172, Details,
39. Vat.ebr.174, Details,
40. Vat.ebr.177, Details,
41. Vat.ebr.182, Details,
42. Vat.ebr.185, Details,
43. Vat.gr.2220, Details,
44. Vat.lat.428, Augustine, City of God, 11th/12th century. Details.
45. Vat.lat.654, Details,
46. Vat.lat.655, Details,
47. Vat.lat.665, Details,
48. Vat.lat.680, Details,
49. Vat.lat.763, Details,
50. Vat.lat.768, Details,
51. Vat.lat.770, Details,
52. Vat.lat.776, Details,
53. Vat.lat.1645, Details, another Seneca with very beautiful scenes in the initials, like this princess on a cellphone on fol 67r:
    
54. Vat.lat.2194, Details,
55. Vat.lat.4781, Details,
56. Vat.lat.8210, Details,
57. Vat.lat.9967, Details,
58. Vat.lat.9974, Details,
59. Vat.sir.1, Details,
60. Vat.sir.14, Details,
61. Vat.sir.16, Details,
62. Vat.sir.20.pt.1, Details,
63. Vat.sir.20.pt.2, Details,
64. Vat.sir.21, Details,
65. Vat.sir.22, Details,
66. Vat.sir.23, Details,
67. Vat.sir.24, Details,
68. Vat.sir.148, Details,
69. Vat.sir.152, Details,
70. Vat.sir.154.pt.1, The older parts of this date from the 8th or 9th century and contain a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew which George of Beeltan wrote while he was imprisoned in Baghdad in about the year 770. George was patriarch of Antioch 758-790 and his citations of earlier theologians such as Julius Africanus are useful in recovering that deeper past. Details,
71. Vat.sir.154.pt.2, ditto, Details.
72. Vat.sir.155, This contains writings of Mar George or Georgi, bishop of the Arab Tribes (died 724), a philosopher and scholar. Details,
73. Vat.sir.156.pt.1, Details,
74. Vat.sir.156.pt.2, including this structure on folio 187v: Details,
    
75. Vat.sir.182, Details,
76. Vat.sir.203, Details,
77. Vat.sir.216, Details,
78. Vat.sir.266, Details,
79. Vat.sir.267, Details,
80. Vat.sir.272, Details,
81. Vat.sir.273, Details,
82. Vat.sir.275, Details,
83. Vat.sir.278, Details,
84. Vat.sir.279, Details,
85. Vat.sir.447, Details,
86. Vat.sir.470, Details,
87. Vat.sir.471, Details,
88. Vat.sir.502, Details,
89. Vat.sir.508, Details,
90. Vat.sir.510, Details,
91. Vat.sir.525, Details,
92. Vat.sir.540, Details,
93. Vat.sir.556, Details,
94. Vat.sir.578, Details,
95. Vat.sir.596, Details,
96. Vat.sir.622, Details,
97. Vat.turc.145, Details,
98. Vat.turc.388, Details, 

This is Piggin's Unofficial List 55. 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.

12 Greatest TextArch News Stories

I posted last week on the fuss over The Gospel of Jesus's Wife, where the new evidence overwhelmingly indicates this tiny papyrus at Harvard University is a forgery.

That prompted me to look for a list of great news stories in the past few years about the archaeology of text, that is to say, recognizing by intelligent reading that a found historical text or diagram attaches to a noted author or a previously unsuspected context. There isn't any list I can find that spans ancient, medieval and modern, so I have compiled one for your reading pleasure.

In this 21st-century tally of great recent #TextArch news stories in date order: the years are of the media attention, not of the discoveries:

1. Troyes ms. 1452 contains 113 anonymous love letters attributable to Héloïse and Abelard (2000 book reviews)
   
2. BAV Vat. sir. 623 contains an unknown comedy by Menander palimpsested with Dyscolus (Harlfinger 2003; Pearse 2011)
3. Artemidorus Papyrus (below) contains only known ancient Greek topographical map (2006 exhibition)
   
4. Archimedes Palimpsest found to contain lost Stomachion and The Method of Mechanical Theorems by Archimedes, Against Timandra and Against Diondas by Hyperides (2007 book)
5. Vlatadon 14 found to contain Galen's lost On Consolation from Grief (2010 Libé; Pearse)
6. Munich BSB cod. graec. 314 found to contain lost Homilies on Psalms of Origen (2012; edition)
7. Papyrus lent to Harvard claimed to contain an unknown Gospel of Jesus's Wife (2012; discredited 2016)
8. Copiale Cipher (book in private ownership?) decoded and linked to German Oculists (2012)
9. Cod. Hierosolymitanus Sancti Sepulcri 36 found to contain a lost text of Euripides (2013)
10. Green Collection cartonnage said to contain portions of two poems by Sappho (2014)
11. Sulaymaniyah Museum Tablet T.1447 revealed to contain 20 lost lines of Gilgamesh (2015)
    
12. Paris BNF NAL 3245 (below) identified as a lost Vita of Francis of Assisi by Thomas de Celano (2015)
    

And next year? Maybe the publication of my book disclosing that an unsuspected Roman-era chart of genealogies and timelines has been reconstructed from segments in medieval manuscripts and turns out to be the world's oldest information visualization. Let me know now (by comments or by Twitter) if this is a book you would want to read or spread word about!

The criteria for my list above (and these all concern the identification of a text or a diagram, not the finding of the support on which the text is written) are:

• the text or diagram lacks any author's name or date;
• scientifically tenable grounds are advanced for the attribution;
• the work is famed: either lost or altering our knowledge of the past;
• stories of it had to crop up over several days in major news media.

I suspect these bunch in years because we in the media tend to re-enact memes, then grow weary of them. A recent article in The Guardian, John Dugdale lists celebrated refindings of 20th-century works in a sudden 2015 rush, which I think tends to support my explanation. I nearly included two great media feasts of 2006:

1. Linking of the anonymous Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things to Percy Bysshe Shelley, but that was essentially about finding the sole surviving printed copy
2. Launch of Antikythera Mechanism project, culminating in this year's Almagest 7/1 edition, but that is essentially an artefact story.

There's also a list at Oxford including some more obscure Graeco-Roman rediscoveries.

And what would you add to my list?