Material (New) Philology and the Dead Sea Scrolls: conference in Copenhagen

The upcoming conference Material Philology and the Dead Sea Scrolls: New Approaches for New Text Editions (3-5 April 2014) should be of interest for readers of this blog. The organizers, the Norwegian project Biblical Texts Older than the Bible and the Danish Qumran Initiative,  have put together an excellent program including some of the leading voices in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and/or editorial theory.

Program here.
Abstracts here.

Conference invitation here. Register before 20 March.

I'll be there.
 

Recycling 4 Ezra: 4 Ezra 8:33-41a and 8:41c-47 in an Arabic codex

During a recent stay at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Nils H. Korsvoll did me the favor of checking Supplément turc 983, fols. 113/126. The item identified by this somewhat obscure shelfmark hides a highly interesting little thing for those of us who are interested in the transmission history of 4 Ezra. It includes a single parchment folio containing Syriac 4 Ezra 8:33-41a on the one side and 8:41c-47 on the other. This folio thus complements our knowledge about the circulation of 4 Ezra, and as far as I know this is only the second attestation of 4 Ezra 8 in Syriac (some other passages are attested in lectionary manuscripts).

The existence of the fragment was made known to (the French reading) public by Bernard Outtier back in 1993 in the article “Un fragment syriaque inédit de IV Esdras” (Apocrypha 4 (1993):19-23). The fragment is also described, but not identified, on page 185 of Françoise Briquel Chatonnet’s catalogue of Syriac manuscripts in the BnF (1997). I came across a reference to it in Les Apocryphes Syriaques, vol 2 (pp. 114-115) where it is mentioned and mistakenly attributed to 2 Baruch. Although published by Outtier some 20 years ago, the fragment is in my experience not generally known among scholars of 4 Ezra. Hence this post.

The folio containing the passages from 4 Ezra illustrates a quite common, and yet fascinating, manuscript practice: folios from manuscripts that were no longer in use were recycled. Together with other parchment folios containing Arabic, Hebrew and Latin texts, the folio containing Syriac 4 Ezra served the purpose of  stiffening and reinforcing the quires of an Arabic paper codex. In other words, the folio was recycled and reused, not due to the literary qualities of the text it contained, but due to the material qualities of the parchment. The size of the folio (170 (165) x 128 mm) was adjusted in order to fit this new purpose, the result being that the upper margin and probably four lines of (precious!) text have quite simply been cut off.

The folio contains 20-21 lines per page, the text is in Estrangelo. Each page has one column of text and narrow margins. The letters are quite large. On the one side of the folio the ink is relatively strong, while on the other side it is rather faint. The margins, particularly the lower margins, contain Arabic notes, some long and some short, written by several hands.

It is not clear whether the codex the folio was once excerpted from contained a “complete version” of 4 Ezra, or whether the codex was an compilation of some sort. Outtier suggests that it might have been part of a liturgical manuscript (p. 19), but he does not provide more information than that. The folio itself does not give away its former function (the first lines of the text have been cut off – there might have been a rubric there but this remains speculation).

The Syriac text of 4 Ezra on the folios are generally quite similar to the Ambrosianus version. There is variance – there always is – but non that changes the content of the text as we know it. I have counted 18 variant readings: some are alternative spellings (e.g. kl instead of kwl), there are differences in punctuation, the relative pronoun is added in a few places, occasional words are added or left out, etc. In addition, three words in verse 40 is left out.

So how about the date of the folio? The Syriac script has been dated paleographically to the 6^th century (Outtier) as well as to the 8^th-9^th century (Briquel Chatonnet). If Outtier is correct, this fragment is among the oldest witnesses we have to any passage of 4 Ezra, possibly as old as, or older than, the version of 4 Ezra in the Codex Ambrosianus. And even if Briquel Chatonnet is right, this 4 Ezra fragment is still pretty early, compared to the Latin, Georgian and Armenian versions. I am however not a paleographer and will not do anything else than to repeat Outtier and Briquel Chatonnet’s points of view on this issue.

Thanks are due to Nils H. Korsvoll!

*This blogpost has been edited*

The Syriac manuscripts in the British Library: what happened to the bindings?

Those of you who have been working on the Syriac manuscripts in the British Library have probably observed that many of these codices have been rebound after arriving in London. The large majority of the codices that I brought to my desk during my stay there came in a fairly recent museum or letterpress binding.

I am working on Syriac codices that have been used in worship contexts. In other words, I am interested in these codices as ritual artifacts, not only as text carriers. Hence, I am curious about the ways in which the aesthetical qualities of the bindings and the overall layout of the codices mattered to those who engaged with them in those contexts.

During my stay in the British Library last year, I asked the academic librarian if it would be possible to see any codices in original binding, enquiring in particular about 13th century bindings. She kindly offered me
to have a look at two beautiful exemplars: Or. 13465 and Or. 8729. Or 13465 (dated 1475) is a particularly well kept New Testament in an original goatskin binding decorated with brass studs. Or. 8729 is a large and beautiful Gospel lectionary with an equally beautifully engraved leather binding (possibly 13th century). A note explains that this binding has been purposefully preserved. The leather covered wooden boards have been turned inside out, so that the embossed leather – formerly the exterior of the codex – now faces the textblock. I could easily understand why these two items had been kept intact. These were items intended to be admired. The bindings were obviously valuable, and in addition they were so well kept that they were still able to perform their main duty: to protect the vulnerable quires of the textblocks.

When I asked the helpful librarian if it would be possible to see an exemplar with the more typical, less expensive, Syriac binding: simple wooden boards covered partly or in whole with equally simple leather (not the ornamented or engraved type), she unfortunately could not offer me any further assistance.

If William Cureton can be trusted on this issue, however, there probably were a few of that kind in London when the Syriac manuscripts arrived there in the 1840s. In his preface to The Festal Letters of Athanasius (1848), Cureton writes the following about the arrival of a new shipment of manuscripts from the Syrian Monastery (Wadi al-Natrun, Egypt), 12 October 1847:

"The day after their arrival I went to inspect them. At the first view I could almost have imagined that the same portion of the library as had been brought, nearly five years previously, by Dr. Tattam, was again before me in the same condition as I found it when the books were first taken from the cases in which they had been packed, as if the volumes had been stripped by magic of their Russia, and clad in their original wooden binding; and the loose leaves and fragments which had cost me many a toilsome day to collect and arrange, had been again torn asunder, and scattered in almost endless confusion. I found the collection to consist of a considerable number of volumes, and a large quantity of disjointed quires and separate leaves” (Cureton, Festal Letters, xiii-xiv).

So, what happened to all these other bindings mentioned by Cureton: all those half-damaged and not-so-pretty, rather mediocre bindings that were not covering the stunningly beautiful display items, but the codices typically intended for use?

I made some further enquiries at the library and was told that the codices were rebound in the last half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, most likely by the HMSO (Her Majesty's Stationary Office) for the British Museum (Thanks are due to Martyn Jones and Cordelia Rogerson).

But what really gave me food for thought was that the library could not provide me with more information than this. Apparently no one had kept records or photographs of the process when the codices were in fact rebound. Consequently, if this is correct, we don’t know what happened to the bindings and we can’t find out what the individual volumes would have looked like.

This is quite striking and interesting in so many ways. On the one hand, it is of course honorable that a library will decide to rebind an item that is longer protected from wear and tear. If a codex is not bound properly, it will fall apart and people like me would not be allowed to study it at all. When it comes down to it, Her Majesty's Stationary Office has only done what binders have always done: when a binding is worn out you repair it. If the binding is beyond repair, you rebind the codex. In addition, as Cureton pointed out, many of these manuscripts did not arrive in London as neatly preserved codices. They arrived in the form of dismantled or unbound quires and sometimes in heaps of single leaves. I am of course grateful to the ones who made the effort to gather them, put them orderly back together and bound them so that scholars can study them.

On the other hand, the procedure of not keeping track neither of the original binding of the codices, nor of the process of rebinding them suggests to me that this was done at a time when scholars and librarians were not that interested in manuscripts as cultural and material objects. The texts contained in the codices mattered a lot, and they still do, but the qualities of the artifact per se did not: particularly not if the item was mediocre, low cost, and manufactured for general use. So unfortunately, at a time when the tide has turned and we are increasingly interested in these aspects of manuscripts, this information is no longer available.

If anyone knows more about what happened to the bindings than I do, or if you have other information than the one I got - please write to me or leave a note below and I will update this post. If anyone knows of more medieval Syriac bindings in the British Library, please let me know that as well. I am going back there next month.

A New Philology reading list

I sometimes get asked about literature on New Philology (New Medievalism/Material Philology). This is an incomplete, but hopefully helpful, reading list for those interested in New Philology and related perspectives. The list presents the literature I have read up on and actually applied in my own research, as well as some valuable input from Hugo Lundhaug. Please, feel free to improve the list by adding other helpful references in the commentary field below.

Forerunners and classics

Cerquiglini, Bernard. Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie. Paris: Seuil, 1989

• or read the English version: In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Nichols, Stephen. “Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 65/1 (1990):1-10.

•    And do have a look at the other articles in 65/1 as well

Zumthor, Paul. Essai de poétique médiéval. Paris: Seuil, 1972.

•           or go for the English translation: Toward a Medieval Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1992.

Introduction/ “In a nutshell”

Driscoll, Matthew J. “Words on the Page: Thoughts on Philology, Old and New.” Pages 85-102 in Creating the Medieval Saga: Versions, Variability, and Editorial Interpretations of Old Norse Saga Literature. Edited by Judy Quinn and Emily Lethbridge. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2010.

• Have a look also at Judy Quinn’s introduction (pp. 13-37)
•  Look for other publications by Driscoll

Studies and discussions (selection)

Bradshaw, Paul F. “Liturgy and ‘Living Literature’.” Pages 138-53 in Liturgy in Dialogue:Essays in Memory of Ronald Jasper. Edited by Paul F. Bradshaw and Bryan Spinks.  London: SPCK, 1993.

• Look for other publications by Bradshaw, particularly if you’re interested in liturgy

Brownlee, Marina S., Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols, eds. The New Medievalism. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991.

• Check out the essays by S.G. Nichols, David F. Hult, R. Howard Bloch etc.

Busby, Keith, ed. Towards a Synthesis? Essays on the New Philology. Amsterdam: Ropopi, 1993.

                                                                                          

Lied, Liv Ingeborg. “Nachleben and Textual Identity: Variants and Variance in the Reception History of 2 Baruch”. Pages 403-28 in Fourth Ezra and Second Baruch: Reconstruction after the Fall. Edited by Matthias Henze and Gabriele Boccaccini with the collaboration of Jason M Zurawski. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 164. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

Lied, Liv Ingeborg and Hugo Lundhaug, eds. Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology. Under contract with De Gruyter. Forthcoming.

• An introduction to New Philology; studies and discussions of the applicability of the perspective to late ancient and early medieval Christian and Jewish texts.

Lundhaug, Hugo. “Case Study, Coptic: Textual Fluidity and the Nag Hammadi Texts”. Handbook of Oriental Manuscript Studies. Forthcoming.

Lundhaug, Hugo. "Nag Hammadi Codex VII and Monastic Manuscript Culture." Forthcoming in Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies, Rome, September 17-22, 2012. Edited by Alberto Camplani et al.

• And have a look at Lundhaug’s NEWCONT project here.

Trachsler, Richard. "How to do Things with Manuscripts: "From Humanist Practice to Recent Textual Criticism," Textual Cultures 1:1 (2006): 5-28.

Varvaro, Alberto. "The 'New Philology' from an Italian Perspective," Text 12 (1999): 49-58.

Philology, background and contextual; related theoretical inputs; other helpful reading

Bryant, John. The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen. Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002.

Petrucci, Armando. Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Timpanaro, Sebastiano. Genesis of Lachmann’s Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

• At least, read Glenn W. Most’s “Editor’s Introduction”.

Look also for literature by

Stephen Nichols (follow him on Academia.edu),
John Dagenais (for instance The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture),
Andrew Taylor (Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers),
Daniel Hobbins (Authorship and Publicity before Print)
Odd Einar Haugen (“The Spirit of Lachmann, the Spirit of Bedier”)

Call for Papers: SBL Annual Meeting 2014, the Pseudepigrapha Section

The call for papers for the SBL Annual Meeting 2014 in San Diego is now open. Here is the call from the Pseudepigrapha Section: 

"The Pseudepigrapha Section is planning to have three sessions at the Annual Meeting in San Diego. The first will be a closed session. Four invited speakers will honor the life’s work of Professor Michael Stone of The Hebrew University. Then two invited speakers will review Andrei A. Orlov’s book Heavenly Priesthood in the Apocalypse of Abraham (Cambridge University Press, 2013). The second session is entitled “Notions of Time in Early Judaism and Christianity.” We invite papers that explore attempts to make sense of the passage of time, broadly conceived, in early Jewish and Christian writings. Preference will be given to papers that are not concerned with the calendars but explore the conceptualization of time across diverse genres of literature. The third session will be an open session. Young scholars and new voices in Pseudepigraphic Studies are especially encouraged to submit abstracts."

The deadline is 5 March 2014.

You find the call here. More information here.

SBL Annual Meeting (again): on manuscripts and amulets (and receptions)

The SBL/AAR Annual Meetings are just around the corner and I am packing my bags.

Together with Nils H. Korsvoll, I will give the paper "Enoch, Baruch, and Sesengen bar Pharanges: An Amulet for Xvarr-Veh-Zad" in the Syriac Literature and Interpretation of Sacred Texts section (Saturday at 9:00 am, Holiday 2 - Hilton Baltimore). You find the abstract here .

I am also one of the panelists in the MOTP-review session (noted here several times already). My response is entitled "Text - Work - Manuscript: what is 'an Old Testament Pseudepigraphon'". In other words, I am dealing with editorial models, our notions of Pseudepigrapha as "works", and how these models and assumptions influence the way we imagine ancient textual units.  Show up at this session! The panelists (Collins, Najman, Kraft and Davila) are great and I promise you a highly interesting discussion!

And while we are at it, the  Nordic Universities Reception takes place at the Sheraton Inner Harbour Hotel, Sunday at 9:00-11:00 pm. You'll find me there - somewhere in the Viking crowd. 

More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha-review session follow up

For those of you planning to attend the SBL review-session dedicated to the volume Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scripture. Volume One, please note that there has been a change in the order of presentations. The correct order is:

John J. Collins
Liv Ingeborg Lied
Robert A. Kraft
Hindy Najman

And then a response by James R. Davila.

Room 334 - Convention Center, Monday 25 November, 1:00-3:30 pm