Extant manuscripts containing the entire Christian Bible are the work of medieval monks. Why? There simply is no such thing as a complete text of the New Testament that we could date to the apostolic times, or even two or three centuries after the last of the apostles. The New Testament that we read today in many different translations is not based on one single manuscript of the original Greek text. Photo: Courtesy of the Walters Art Museum 261b) it states the manuscript was copied by Ilyās Bāsim Khūrī Bazzī Rāhib in the year “7192 after Adam” (A.D. This page with a colophon comes from an illuminated Arabic manuscript of the four Gospels (Walters MS. These so-called colophons may include a date, but dates only become common in Greek biblical manuscripts in the ninth century. Between 2020-2022, we are restoring, describing, digitizing, uploading on the Swiss platform Fragmentarium, and exhibiting in Cluj (physically) and in Oslo (virtually) a series of manuscript fragments from the Academy Library in Cluj.SOME BIBLICAL MANUSCRIPTS include short notes to the reader from the scribe who copied the manuscript. In order to give manuscript fragments from Transylvanian collections international visibility, the Centre for Manuscript Studies at the University of Cluj and the Academy Library in Cluj cooperate with Norwegian and Swiss partners, in a project funded by the Romanian Ministry of Culture thanks to an Iceland-Liechtenstein-Norway grant. The appropriate study of these fragments is thus of utmost importance in the attempt to reconstruct the medieval collections of Cluj. So far, we have been able to identify 179 fragments in the bindings of books from the Academy Library in Cluj, and also a handful of loose fragments in Budapest. Membra disiecta from the Benedictine abbey’s codices ended up in the Library of the Romanian Academy in Cluj (which preserves the historical holdings of the religious orders and churches from the Cluj area), but also at the University Library, at the State Archive of Cluj, at the National Archives of Hungary, and at the Academy Library in Budapest. The town administration also used old parchment manuscripts as maculature to bind sundry annals and account books. However, many other leaves have survived in the bindings of early-modern Unitarian and Jesuit books. from 1509-14 (Biblioteca Centrală Universitară, MS 1030), or a large choir books from St Michael’s parish church (Alba Iulia, Bibl. the Inventarium conventus Coloswariensis O. ![]() Only a few of these books are still extant - e.g. Digitizing and cataloging these fragments could help reconstitute some of the medieval collections of our region.įor instance, the Benedictine abbey of Cluj-Mănăștur, established in the mid-eleventh century, had a collection of manuscripts attested by an inventory drafted in 1427, and so did the Dominican convent of Cluj, and the parish church of St Michael. ![]() However, hitherto unfathomed amounts of fragmenta codicum have been preserved in the bindings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books and manuscripts. Due to massive destructions in the modern age, very little has survived from the book collections of medieval Transylvania – the easternmost rampart of Western European civilization.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |