FullReads

To find, as the late Mr. Greenwell of Durham found, a leaf of a sixth-century Latin Bible from Wearmouth or Jarrow (or perhaps even from Cassiodorus’s library) in a curiosity shop, is a chance that comes to few. But I have always lamented that I did not pass through the streets of Orleans at the time (not many years back) when an illustrated Greek MS. of the Gospels on purple vellum and in gold and silver uncials was exposed for sale in a shop window. A French officer had picked it up at Sinope, and used it to keep dried plants in. However, it went to its rightful and proper home, the Bibliotheque Nationale.

It is getting on for thirty years now since a small parish library in Suffolk, founded in 1700, gave to the world the book of the Gospels owned by St. Margaret of Scotland (at Oxford), and the unique life of St. William, the boy martyr of Norwich, and Nicholas Roscarrock’s Register of British Saints (both at Cambridge). Not as long since, in a private library in Italy, some leaves were found of the early MS. (from Hersfeld Abbey in Germany) of the minor writings of Tacitus from which all our extant fifteenth-century copies descend. Still more recently, among a collection of scraps of MSS., a half leaf of an eleventh or twelfth century MS. in Welsh was detected (a very great rarity); its generous finder (the late Mr. A. G. W. Murray, librarian of Trinity College) gave it to the Cambridge University Library, and thus added one more to the already remarkable collection of bits of early Welsh which Cambridge owns. It deals with the dry topic of finding Easter, but linguistically it is above price.

And now for an example which shows the odd wanderings of texts. There is a volume at Vienna, from Bobbio, made up of palimpsest leaves from many MSS., Biblical and classical. Two of these, apparently from one book, stand next to each other. They have only recently been deciphered; they are in Latin uncials of the fifth century. One of them is from the Apocalypse of Thomas, a book named in an old list of Apocryphal writings, but thought until a few years ago to be hopelessly lost. We now know complete MSS. of it at Munich and a fragment at Verona, as well as an Anglo-Saxon version in the Vercelli MS. The other Vienna leaf is from an equally apocryphal “epistle of the Apostles,” never mentioned by old writers, but seemingly of the second century. It gives a dialogue between our Lord and the Apostles after the Resurrection. About 1897 Dr. Carl Schmidt, a leading Coptic scholar, published an account of a Coptic MS. of the greater part of the book (the MS. is at Berlin, and some time will be edited); and about 1913 a French scholar, Abbe Guerrier, published a complete version of it from Ethiopic MSS. which had been in Europe for half a century. It is about the last book I should have expected to find in a Latin version, and current in Italy in the fifth century. The combination of Egypt and Abyssinia is common enough; but that Bobbio should be added to that, and Asia Minor and Greece omitted, is indeed a strange thing. Perhaps Africa was the parent of the Latin version.

THE MORAL

So texts and books wander, and so do discoveries sometimes lie near our hands. The moral is: Be inquisitive. See books for yourself; do not trust that the cataloguer has told you everything. I am a cataloguer myself, and I know that, try as he may, a worker of that class cannot hope to know or to see every detail that is of importance. The creature is human, and on some days his mind is less alert than on others. Nor is he interested in everything alike: an apocryphal fragment or an obscure saint will excite me, while a letter of St. Bernard which may be unpublished leaves me calm. But in spite of the imperfections of cataloguers, catalogues must be used, and they must be read and not only referred to. The mere juxtaposition of treatises in a volume will often reveal its provenance or its pedigree; besides, there is always the chance I have suggested, that the describer of any MS. may have failed through ignorance or want of attention to see that some article in it is of extreme interest and rarity. So it was that in reading Lambecius’s (eighteenth-century) catalogue of the Greek MSS. at Vienna I noted down an entry that seemed unusual; and some years after, when I had an opportunity of getting a friend at Vienna to look at the tract in question, it was found to be the unique copy of the very most heretical (and therefore interesting) episode of the apocryphal Acts of St. John, written in the second century, and copied, to our lasting astonishment and perplexity, by some honest orthodox cleric in the fourteenth.