Part 4 (2/2)

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 cla.s.sical. 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 cla.s.s 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everything alike: an apocryphal fragment or an obscure saint will excite me, while a letter of St. Bernard which may be unpublished leaves me calm.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.

May discoveries infinitely more pleasing fall to the lot of many of my patient readers!

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The student may consult the following works:

J. W. CLARK: The Care of Books. Cambridge, 1901.

E. A. SAVAGE: Old English Libraries. London, 1911.

Containing a useful bibliography.

M. R. JAMES: The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover (Cambridge, 1903); the Abbey of St.

Edmund at Bury, (1895) and the Catalogues of the MSS. of the Libraries at Eton and at Cambridge, by the same author.

M. BATESON: Catalogue of the Library of Syon Monastery, Isleworth. 1898.

List of Catalogues of English Book Sales, 1676-1906, now in the British Museum. London, 1915.

E. A. LOEW: The Beneventan Script. Oxford, 1914.

TH. GOTTLIEB: Ueber Mittelalterliche Bibliotheken.

Leipzig, 1890.

T. DUFFUS HARDY: Descriptive Catalogue of Materials relating to the History of Great Britain. Rolls Series, 1862-71.

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Let not the 400 MSS. given by Coislin to the Abbey of St. Germain des Pres at Paris be quoted against me. They were the collection of a great n.o.ble, the Chancellor Seguier, and the library to which they were presented was practically a public one, whose permanence was seemingly a.s.sured.

[B] _See_ Eubel, _Hierarchia Catholica Medii aevi_, ii. 248.

[C] We have its catalogue admirably reproduced by Thomas Hearne, at a time (early in the eighteenth century) when it was rare to find anyone who would take the trouble to make a faithful copy of such a record, with all its erasures and alterations.

[D] Subsequently Theyer, as I said, went on collecting MSS., and finally Charles II. bought the whole lot for the Royal Library.

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