Yours, Mine, or Theirs? Historical Observations on the Use, Collection and Sharing of Manuscripts in Western Europe and the Christian Orient 9781463216801

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Yours, Mine, or Theirs? Historical Observations on the Use, Collection and Sharing of Manuscripts in Western Europe and the Christian Orient

Analecta Gorgiana

126 Series Editor George Anton Kiraz

Analecta Gorgiana is a collection of long essays and short monographs which are consistently cited by modern scholars but previously difficult to find because of their original appearance in obscure publications. Carefully selected by a team of scholars based on their relevance to modern scholarship, these essays can now be fully utilized by scholars and proudly owned by libraries.

Yours, Mine, or Theirs? Historical Observations on the Use, Collection and Sharing of Manuscripts in Western Europe and the Christian Orient

Columba Stewart

9

34 2009

Gorgias Press LLC, 180 Centennial Ave., Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2009 by Gorgias Press LLC Originally published in 2008 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. 2009

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ISBN 978-1-60724-059-4

ISSN 1935-6854

This extract originally appeared in George A. Kiraz, ed., Malphono w-Rabo d-Malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock, Gorgias Press, 2008, pages 603–630.

Printed in the United States of America

YOURS, MINE, OR THEIRS? HISTORICAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE USE, COLLECTION AND SHARING OF MANUSCRIPTS IN WESTERN EUROPE AND THE CHRISTIAN ORIENT COLUMBA STEWART, O.S.B. HILL MUSEUM & MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY SAINT JOHN’S ABBEY AND UNIVERSITY One of the stock characters of the western popular imagination is a monk hunched over a desk, quill in hand. A candle is burning down to a stump, piles of parchment are scattered about in blessed disarray. Sometimes there is a cat. This icon of persistence has been used to exemplify monastic preservation of western culture during the Middle Ages and to sell modern photocopying equipment. Both uses are relevant to my reflections here on the use and guardianship of manuscripts across the centuries in both Europe and the Christian Orient.1 As a Benedictine monk, I have inherited the impulse for cultural preservation. I joined a monastery that has devoted considerable resources to modern forms of manuscript copying using microfilm and digital technology to ensure that the contents of manuscripts are preserved even if the manuscripts themselves are lost in war, fire, or natural disaster.2 The readers of this Festschrift need no introduction to the Understood here as the Middle East (including Turkey), the Caucasus, and Ethiopia/Eritrea. The Syriac-tradition communities of India have their own distinctive history, beyond the scope of this paper. 2 In 1965, at the height of the Cold War, Saint John’s Abbey and University founded what is now the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) in Collegeville, Minnesota. The immediate impetus was the threat to monastic libraries in Austria from the possibility of nuclear war in Europe, but the project soon spread across the European continent and to Ethiopia. In 2003, HMML began a new initiative devoted to collections of eastern Christian manuscripts in the Middle 1

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importance of such an effort: for most of you, manuscripts are central to your work, and many of you are well-acquainted with the history and often tragic fate of particular manuscript collections, as well as with the questionable circumstances in which important western collections of manuscripts from the Christian Orient were formed. A review of that history and a consideration of the present situation of church-held manuscript collections in the Christian Orient (and the risks they face), can inform present-day efforts to strengthen the bond between those communities and their manuscripts, while finding ways to make such collections more accessible to the broad scholarly community.

MANUSCRIPTS AND THEIR COMMUNITIES Few extant old manuscripts are original in the sense of containing a fresh text composed by their scribes or a scribe’s patron. The great majority are copies of lost originals. Because they are links in a chain of textual and cultural transmission, they naturally “want” to be copied.3 This is especially true, of course, for ancient texts, where physical survival of any manuscript is extremely rare because of the effects of climate, storage conditions, and the hundred intervening events that affect the fate of an ancient object. Most manuscripts, however, have simply worn out and eventually become unusable. If the text was important, it was recopied directly from the worn manuscript or replaced by a copy from another exemplar, and the physical components of the codex were reused or discarded. This is not to suggest that manuscripts have value simply as carriers of texts. There is no such thing as a pure text, especially when speaking of texts found in manuscripts. The thousand variants introduced in the process of copying, the selection and arrangement of sources, the style of writing or decoration, the form of binding, the addition of historical information about the copyist, the owner, or the circumstances of copying form the very basis of manuscript studies. Today this is even more keenly appreciated than in the past, with growing interest in bindings and other aspects of book technology, as well as deeper appreciation of the

East, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, and southwest India. For more information: www.hmml.org. 3 In the modern sense that proponents of the Internet employ when they claim that “information wants to be free,” i.e., easily available to those who have reason to seek it (and, preferably, at no or little cost).

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significance of manuscript illumination and embellishment for the history of visual arts.4 Because every manuscript is created within a complex web of relationships and circumstances, it cannot be understood apart from other copies of the same text(s) or from the communities which produced or subsequently cared for it. This “stickiness” of manuscripts sets them apart from other kinds of artifacts, which typically bear less information about their creation and later context. This quality is most vigorous when members of the tradition that created and used a manuscript retain guardianship of it. Just as it was characteristic of manuscripts to be copied, so too was it typical for them to travel and to be gathered into collections. Bishops or abbots ordered copies of important texts they knew were available in other libraries5 and collected manuscripts on their own journeys. Important churches and monasteries received gifts of manuscripts. Collections were transferred from place to place as individuals or communities relocated. Manuscript collections, like most modern libraries, developed both by design and by accident. When this development can be traced over centuries through information contained in the manuscripts themselves or from associated archival materials, one obtains a privileged perspective on the history of the community itself, chronicling periods of both strength

4 The change in attitude is evident when comparing the black and white microfilms from HMML’s earlier projects, which are entirely of texts, with the high-resolution color digital imaging of the recent projects, which captures every aspect of the manuscript, including bindings, endpapers or cloths, the page-edges of the closed book. The difference is partly owing to the limitations of bitonal microfilm (though color film was used for illuminations), but also reflects the nature of scholarly interest in the 1960s. 5 Wright notes the provision for a six-month loan (for copying) recorded in one of the manuscripts from the Monastery of Deir es-Suryan in Egypt (MS. Add. 14,472 as in Wright, Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3:xxix and 1:82). I cannot help but observe that there is a famous story about Saint Columba’s being taken before a court for copying a manuscript without permission, a tale cited as the first known instance of the definition and enforcement of copyright with the judgment that “as to every cow belongs her calf, so to every book belongs its copy.”

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and weakness.6 Much is lost when the ties between a manuscript and its historic guardians have been severed.

MANUSCRIPTS AND MANUSCRIPT CULTURE IN WESTERN EUROPE In Europe, the two pillars of manuscript-based culture, regular use of manuscripts for intellectual and religious purposes and guardianship by historic communities, have been broken for centuries. The demise of a manuscript-based literary culture through widely-available printing technology, as well as the impact of the Reformation and later political upheavals on monastic and other ecclesiastical libraries, turned manuscripts in the west into artifacts to be preserved, protected, and studied. This shift from everyday object to artifact took time, passing through a stage when both manuscripts and printed books were in common use, then through stages of gradual obsolescence of manuscripts. The rise of manuscriptbased scholarship and the development of scientific approaches to paleography, diplomatics, and codicology in the seventeenth century led to a greater esteem for manuscript books and other handwritten documents, and to efforts to gather them into secure libraries and archives. Even if western manuscripts had not been systematically removed from their original communities by religious and political upheavals in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, and even if the continuity with Latin medieval religious culture had not been irrevocably ruptured by the Reformation and the Catholic response to it, the link between manuscript and user was broken in the west by the new technology of printing. Long before the Reformation, in fact, Benedictines were enthusiastic early adopters of printing: Peter Schöffer printed a Psalter for the monks of Mainz in 1459, and in 1464/5 Benedict’s own monastery at Subiaco housed the first printing press in Italy, established by the German clerical printing duo of Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz. Despite the attempts of monastic humanists such as the eccentric Abbot John Trithemius (1462– 1516) to preserve manuscript culture through the encouragement of copying as a spiritual practice (see his 1492 work, De laude scriptorum), the cause was lost. Trithemius himself, a great collector and commissioner of manuscripts in many languages, took advantage of printing for the diffusion 6 Two outstanding examples where this is possible are the libraries at Sankt Gallen in Switzerland and Deir as-Suryan in Egypt, both described in more detail below.

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of his own writings on monastic spirituality and reform, including his defense of manuscript copying.7 Obviously, manuscripts continued to be written for private use and where there was no reasonable possibility of printing,8 but were no longer the central means of literary transmission. The value of manuscripts for scholarship became increasingly apparent as tools were developed for their scientific study. With that recognition also came the impulse to consolidate manuscripts into large collections for more convenient consultation. Leading the process of both analysis and collection were the Belgian Jesuits known as the Bollandists, famed for their work on hagiography in the monumental Acta Sanctorum,9 and the more wide-ranging French Benedictines of the Congregation of Saint Maur. Though typified by their most famous scholars, Jean Mabillon (1632–1707) for Latin texts and Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–1741) for Greek, the Maurists counted among their number many other distinguished editors and commentators. The Maurist enterprise demonstrates how esteem for the historical and literary value of manuscripts can encourage their collection, for the congregation brought manuscripts from its member monasteries to its principal house, the Abbey of Saint Germain-des-Prés in Paris. Particularly notable was the transfer in 1638 of 400 manuscripts, the bulk of the collection, from the monastery of Corbie a decade after that house joined

7 Printed by Peter von Friedberg of Mainz in 1492, and most conveniently accessible in the edition of Klaus Arnold, featuring an English translation by Roland Behrendt, O.S.B.: Johannes Trithemius. In Praise of Scribes (De laude scriptorum). (Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1974). 8 This was often the case for liturgical books. One of the manuscripts in HMML’s collection is an elaborately ornamented Dominican Processionale dated 1541. Containing both prayers and music, it has everything needed for the actual processions but does not include any other liturgical materials. These, it is noted in the colophon, can be found in “other books.” The scribe advises further that he omits the additional texts contained in printed versions (MS. Arca Artium Latin 9). 9 Named after Jesuit hagiographer Jean Bolland (1596–1665), their project was conceived by Heribert Rosweyde (1569–1629), famous as editor of the Vitae patrum (the Latin version of the Apophthegmata and other texts on eastern monks, published in 1615 at Antwerp). On the Bollandists, see most recently Robert Godding, et al., Bollandistes, saints et légendes. Quatre siècles de recherche hagiographique (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 2007). An earlier classic study, originally published in 1942, is that of Paul Peeters, L’oeuvre des Bollandistes. Nouvelle édition augmentée d’une notice biobibliographique des PP. Delehaye et Peeters, Subsidia Hagiographica 24a (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1961).

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the Maurist reform.10 The Maurists were also famous for their voyages littéraires, in which they would go from monastery to monastery, and from church to church, looking for inscriptions, charters, and manuscript books, writing it all up in travelogue form.11 They would copy and sometimes purchase what they found, acting as agents both for the Bibliothèque Royale and for their own library at Saint Germain-des-Prés. By this time, of course, manuscripts had long been displaced by printed books for daily purposes. Furthermore, fewer and fewer western religious communities retained their historic manuscript collections. Within less than a century after Mabillon’s death in 1707, the guardianship of manuscripts by religious communities in Europe would be virtually ended. In the British Isles, monastic libraries had been seized at the Reformation, with most of the manuscripts eventually finding their way to university collections or the British Museum. Libraries at monastic cathedrals such as Canterbury, Durham, and Winchester remained in ecclesiastical, though non-monastic, hands, though the religious culture had changed dramatically from the Latin Catholic tradition within which the manuscripts had been created. In Protestant regions of Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, manuscripts from religious houses were sent to royal or noble libraries, or deposited in university collections. Even in countries where the Reformation ultimately had little traction, the eighteenth century reforms of the Austrian Emperor Joseph II led to the suppression of most religious houses in Hapsburg lands in the 1780s.12 While many monasteries later reopened, the cycle of closure and reopening that continued for decades had a dire impact on manuscript collections in monasteries and other religious houses. Many collections were seized by the

On the transfer of these manuscripts to Paris in 1638, see Léopold Delisle, Le Cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale, vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1874), 136–39. 11 See Daniel-Odon Hurel, “La Place de l’érudition dans le Voyage littéraire de Dom Edmond Martène et Dom Ursin Durand (1717 et 1724),” Revue Mabillon n.s. 3/o.s. 64 (1992), 213–228, which includes descriptions of the earlier journeys by Mabillon et al. 12 Derek Edward Dawson Beales, Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-century Europe (London/ New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 227–55. 10

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state; others moved from one monastery to another as communities relocated.13 In France, the Revolutionary confiscation of church property in the 1790s greatly enriched existing state libraries and archives, with perhaps the most famous example being the transfer in 1795 of most of the great Maurist Benedictine library of Saint Germain-des-Prés to the “Bibliothèque de la Nation.”14 The preceding Revolutionary upheavals had allowed the theft of significant portions of the Maurist collection in 1791, including many of the finest manuscripts from Corbie.15 A fire in 1794 destroyed many others, but the collection ultimately deposited at the Bibliothèque de la Nation was still extraordinary: the manuscript count of the Maurists’ main collection included 1800 Latin, 800 Oriental (including 29 in Syriac), 400 Greek, and 2800 French, Italian, and Spanish codices. These included the extremely important Coislin collection of Greek and Oriental manuscripts, known by the name of their second owner, Henri-Charles du Cambont de Coislin, Bishop of Metz (d. 1732), but actually collected by his great-grandfather, Pierre Séguier (1588–1672), French Chancellor and avid bibliophile. Most of the Greek manuscripts came from Mount Athos, others from Turkey; the Arabic, Coptic and Syriac were found in Egypt, including the Monastery of Saint Macarius in Wadi Natrun.16 Ironically, there had been a competition for the collection between the Maurists and partisans of the Bibliothèque du Roi after Séguier’s death and then again as Bishop Coislin considered how to dispose of the collection. The Bishop wanted the manuscripts to be available to scholars, and ultimately decided 13 For an overview of the fate of Austrian monastic libraries in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, see the summary at: http://www.hmml.org/centers/ austria_ germany/austria/austrialist.htm. 14 Formerly known as the Bibliothèque du Roi or Bibliothèque Royale, and from 1848 by its present name of Bibliothèque Nationale. 15 Some of the best were obtained by the Russian bibliophile Piotr Dubrovsy, and sold in 1805 to the Imperial Library in Saint Petersburg (now the National Library of Russia). See Delisle, Le Cabinet des manuscrits, 2:52–59 and 139, and Michel François, “Les Manuscrits de Saint-Germain à Leningrad,” in Mémorial du XIVe centenaire de l’Abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Paris: J. Vrin, 1959), 333–41. Delisle notes, “Privé de renseignements sur la manière dont Pierre Dubrowski devint possesseur des livres volés à Saint-Germain, je m’abstiens d’apprécier le caractère d’un homme à qui la Russie doit tant de précieux monuments dont la place est restée vide dans nos collections” (Le Cabinet des manuscrits, 2:52). 16 See Delisle, Le Cabinet des manuscrits, 2.78–99. Some of these were among the manuscripts stolen in 1791 that later turned up in Russia.

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in favor of the Benedictines because not only would they place the collection at the service of both Church and State, they would pray for him as well. The excellent catalogue of the Greek manuscripts in the collection by Maurist Bernard de Montfaucon evidently helped to close the deal.17 Besides the Séguier/Coislin collection, another 1700 manuscripts in various languages also held at Saint Germain-des-Prés were transferred as well, along with the notes and other materials used by the Maurists in their scholarly work.18 Within a decade, the spread of French power and of Napoleon’s convictions about the backwardness of religious orders had led to the closure of monasteries and other religious houses across Europe, extending east through the Iberian Peninsula, west to southern Germany, and south through the Catholic regions of Switzerland and into Italy. In Germany, the Napoleonic secularization of monasteries in Catholic Bavaria in 1802–1803 transferred manuscripts to government institutions, greatly expanding existing collections such as the Court Library in Munich (now the Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek) and the State University (then at Landshut, later moved to Munich).19 The common German name for the process of secularization, Aufhebung, deftly captures the notions both of closure (of the monasteries) and removal (of valuable items).20 The primary agent for the dispersion of monastic libraries in Bavaria, Johann Christoph von Aretin (1772–1824), had visited Paris to study the organization of the newly acquired collections in the Bibliothèque Nationale.21 Combining a major post at the Hofbibliothek with service as head of the Klosterkommission dedicated to the distribution of monastic libraries, Von Aretin was wellDelisle, Le Cabinet des manuscrits, 2.99. Montfaucon’s catalogue is the stillimpressive Bibliotheca Coisliniana, olim Segueriana (Paris: L. Guerin et C. Robustel, 1715). 18 Delisle, Le Cabinet des manuscrits, 2.48–50. 19 Hermann Hauke, “Die Bedeutung der Säkularisation für die bayerischen Bibliotheken,” in J. Kirmeier and Manfred Treml, eds., Glanz und Ende der alten Klöster. Säkularisation im bayerischen Oberland 1803 (Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1991). 20 Jeffrey Garrett, “Aufhebung im doppelten Wortsinn: The Fate of Monastic Libraries in Central Europe, 1780–1810,” presented at the conference “Der Beitrag der Orden zur katholischen Aufklärung,” Piliscsaba, Hungary, October 3, 1997, available at http://www.library/northwestern.edu/collections/garrett/kloster/. 21 See E. Heyse Dummer, “Johann Christoph von Aretin: A re-evaluation,” Library Quarterly 16 (1946), 108–21. 17

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placed to build the collection in Munich, where he was assisted by a former Benedictine monk who had left monastic life in disgust after being forbidden to read Kant.22 While some printed books were returned to monastic hands after the refounding of Bavarian monasteries from 1830,23 the manuscripts remained in the secular libraries. The exceptions to this consolidation of manuscript collections in state libraries in western Europe are few. In Switzerland, the exceptional collection of the Abbey at Sankt Gallen survives to this day, a rare example of a great European monastic manuscript collection still in its original location. Although the monastery itself was dissolved in 1805, the library with its 2100 manuscript codices was placed under the administration of the Roman Catholic Church.24 Its sister monastery on the island of Reichenau, just across the German frontier, was secularized in 1803 and its collection of 450 manuscripts transferred to the Hofbibliothek (now the Landesbibliothek) in Karlsruhe two years later.25 The two collections have the closest of historical ties, and digital projects now offer the prospect of a virtual reunion. In nineteenth- century Italy, both Napoleon’s influence and Italian nationalism led to the confiscation of libraries in monasteries and other religious houses. The great Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino,

22 Martin Schrettinger (1772–1851), a monk of Weissenohe from 1793–1802. Schrettinger coined the term “Library Science”: see his Versuch eines vollständigen Lehrbuchs der Bibliothek-Wissenschaft oder Anleitung zur vollkommenen Geschäftsführung eines Bibliothekars in wissenschaftlicher Form abgefasst (Munich, 1808–10; rev. ed. Munich: Lindauer’sche Buchhandlung, 1829). 23 From these remnants, our Benedictine library in Minnesota received its first major holdings of printed books in 1877, sent by the monasteries of Ottobeuren and Metten. 24 On the history of the collection, see most recently the overview by Johannes Duft, “Die Handschriften-Katalogisierung in der Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen vom 9. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert,” in Beat Matthias von Scarpatetti, Die Handschriften der Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen. Codices 1726–1984 (14.-19. Jahrhundert) (St. Gallen: Stiftsbibliothek, 1983), 9*-99*. On the importance of early manuscript production at Sankt Gallen, see Walther Berschin, “Die Anfänge der literarischen Kultur,” in Werner Wunderlich, ed., St. Gallen. Geschichte einer literarischen Kultur (St. Gallen: UVK Fachverlag für Wissenschaft und Studium, 1999), 1:113–23. 25 On the transfer to Karlsruhe, see Kurt Hannemann, “Geschichte der Erschließung der Handschriftenbestände der Reichenau in Karlsruhe,” in Helmut Maurer, ed., Die Abtei Reichenau. Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte und Kultur des Inselklosters (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1974), 159–252, esp. 164–174.

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including its outstanding library, was declared a national monument in 1866, with the monks allowed to remain in residence.26 The Vatican Library is an apparent exception to the tendency for western manuscript collections to migrate from ecclesiastical ownership. But the manuscript holdings of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana can hardly be considered a collection like that of a monastery, or even a monastic congregation like the Maurists: more like a great national or university library, it is a “collection of collections” obtained from many places through purchase, donation, or consolidation. The modern shape of the Library and the accession of many of its present manuscript holdings are from the sixteenth and later centuries. The layers of fondi reflect the papacy’s historical and geographical reach, with the addition of important Italian collections, manuscripts brought from the Christian Orient, and the later consolidation of holdings from the Propaganda Fide and various colleges in Rome.27 In Catholic and Protestant Europe alike, the results were similar: the concentration of manuscript holdings into major repositories. With the religious and intellectual use of manuscripts as the primary bearers of literary culture ended by the advent of printing and the reorientation of religious life in both the Reformation and its Catholic response, manuscript collections became the preserve of curators and researchers. While the loss of the original cultural context and the removal of collections from their religious owners is poignant, it must be admitted, however, that it generally meant that the manuscripts were better kept and more accessible than if they had been left with communities who would have had little use for them beyond perhaps a nostalgic wish to keep them around. The Maurists The standard account is Luigi Tosti, in his “Prolegomena” to Bibliotheca casinensis, seu Codicum manuscriptorum qui in tabulario casinensi asservantur ([Monte Cassino], 1873–94), 1:l–liii. 27 The standard history is Jeanne Bignami Odier, La Bibliothèque Vaticane de Sixte IV à Pie XI. Recherches sur l’histoire des collections des manuscrits, Studi e testi 272 (Vatican City: BAV, 1973). The early history of the Oriental collections can be found in Giorgio Levi della Vida, Ricerche sulla formazione del più antico fondo dei manoscritti orientali della Biblioteca vaticana, Studi e testi 92 (Vatican City: BAV, 1939), which for the later additions needs to be complemented by Assemani’s Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana (Rome: Propaganda Fide, 1719) and the more recent catalogues of the various fondi. See also Alastair Hamilton, “Eastern Churches and Western Scholarship,” in Rome Reborn: the Vatican Library and Renaissance Scholarship, ed. Anthony Grafton (Washington: Library of Congress, 1993), 225–49. 26

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were remarkable partly because they were so unusual: the general run of Benedictines, like members of other religious orders, were not particularly interested in manuscripts. For those who had intellectual or literary interests, printed books served just fine.

MANUSCRIPTS AND MANUSCRIPT CULTURE IN THE CHRISTIAN ORIENT In the Christian Orient, the cultural forces that so dramatically altered the place of manuscripts in the west have played a significant role for less than 150 years (and, in some cases, much less). Although printing in Arabic, Armenian, Ge‛ez, Georgian, and Syriac has a long and fascinating history, printed works only slowly obtained a position of dominance over manuscripts in the Christian Orient.28 Early printing in these languages was done mostly in Europe, and more particularly in Italy, for export to eastern markets.29 The Typographia Medicea founded in 1584,30 and its successor, the Typographia Polyglotta at the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (founded 1626), produced handsome books in a dazzling array of eastern languages as part of the effort toward union of eastern churches with Rome. In Padua, Cardinal Gregorio Barbarigo (bishop from 1664 to 1697), founded the Tipografia del Seminario, which published books in

See Rijk Smitskamp, Philologia Orientalis: A description of books illustrating the study and printing of oriental languages in 16th- and 17th-century Europe (Leiden: Brill, 1992); Sprachen des Nahen Ostens/ Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution. A cross-cultural encounter, ed. Eva Hanebutt-Benz, Dagmar Glass, and Geoffrey Roper (Westhofen: WVA-Verlag Skulima, 2002); Gerald Duverdier, “Les impressions orientales en Europe et le Liban,” in Le Livre et le Liban (Paris, 1982), 157–279. On Syriac in particular, see the article by J. F. Coakley in Sprachen des Nahen Ostens/ Middle Eastern Languages (pp. 93–115) and his elegant and judicious The Typography of Syriac. A historical catalogue of printing types, 1537–1958 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press/London: British Library, 2006). 29 Giorgio Vercellin, Venezia e l’origine della stampa in caratteri arabi (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2001). 30 Alberto Tinto, La Tipografia medicea orientale (Lucca: M. Pacini Fazzi, 1987), and Hendrik D. L. Vervliet, Cyrillic & Oriental Typography in Rome at the End of the Sixteenth Century: an inquiry into the later work of Robert Granjon (1578–90) (Berkeley: Poltroon Press, 1981), ET of Robert Granjon à Rome, 1578–1589. Notes préliminaires à une histoire de la typographie romaine à la fin du XVIe siècle (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger & Co., 1967). 28

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Arabic, Ge‛ez, Greek, and Syriac.31 From the mid-16th century, German printers produced texts in Syriac and Arabic edited by, and intended for, western scholars.32 Venice became a great center of Armenian printing with the founding of the Mechitarist Press at San Lazzaro in 1789 (it closed only in 1991).33 Printing in Georgian began in Rome with Stefano Paolini’s Italian-Georgian dictionary (Rome, 1629),34 with indigenous printing from the mid-18th century. Marcellus Silber printed his astonishing Ethiopic Psalter in Rome in 1513,35 and while there was later European printing of texts in Ge‛ez, there was no printing press active in Ethiopia itself until the early 20th century. There were, however, important early printing efforts among Christians in the Middle East.36 Notable among them was the Syriac press at Quzhayya in Lebanon from 1610 and the Arabic presses in Aleppo and Khonchara in the early 18th century.37 It was only in the nineteenth century that major printing operations in the Middle East began to produce substantial numbers of printed works in Arabic and Syriac, among them the American Presbyterians in Urmia (from 1841), the Jesuit press in Beirut (from 1847), and the Dominican Press in Mosul (from 1860). 31

See Giuseppe Bellini, Storia della Tipografia del Seminario di Padova 1684–1938 (Padua: Gregoriana, 1938). 32 Notable among them were the Syriac New Testament of J. A. Widmanstetter (Liber sacrosancti evangelii de Iesv Christo Domino & Deo nostro…. characteribus & lingua Syra, Iesv Christo vernacula, diuino ipsius ore cōsecrata, et à Ioh. Euāgelista Hebraica dicta… [Vienna: Michael Cymermannus, 1555]) and the Qur‛an of Abraham Hinckelmann (Al-coranus: s. Lex Islamitica Muhammedis filii Abdallae pseudoprophetae… [Hamburg: Ex officiana Schulzio-Schilleriana, 1694)]. On Widmanstetter’s edition, see now Robert J. Wilkinson, Orientalism, Aramaic, and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation: the first printing of the Syriac New Testament (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2007). 33 See Kevork Bardakjian, The Mekhitarist Contributions to Armenian Culture and Scholarship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library, 1976). 34 Dittionario giorgiano e italiano (Rome: Propaganda Fide, 1629). 35 Psalterium David et cantica aliqua. In lingua Chaldea [sic]. Edidit Joannes Potken (Rome: Marcellus Silber, 1513). 36 For examples, see The Beginning of Printing in the Near and Middle East: Jews, Christians, and Muslims (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001) and Wahid Gdoura, Le début de l’imprimerie arabe à Istanbul et en Syrie: Évolution de l’environnement culturel (1706– 1787), Publications de l’Institut Supérieur de Documentation 8 (Tunis, 1985). 37 Joseph Nasrallah, L’imprimerie au Liban (Beirut: Imprimerie St. Paul, 1949) and Basile Aggoula, “Le livre libanais de 1585 à 1900,” in Le Livre et le Liban (Paris, 1982), 295–320.

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It is no surprise, then, that manuscripts continued to be in common use in the Christian Orient much longer than in the west. Printed books have often been scarcer than manuscripts in the region,38 and in some areas continue to be used to this day. In the Tur ‛Abdin and in Syria, for example, one still finds manuscripts in liturgical use. I was told by Mor Silwanos, the Syriac Orthodox bishop in Homs, that churches in more remote parts of his diocese continue to use manuscripts because they cannot afford the new printed editions. The same must surely still be true of remote communities of the Church of the East in Iraq. These are typically not old manuscripts, and because they contain standard liturgical texts, they are rarely of particular interest to scholars. They do, however, represent the continuation of an ancient scribal tradition. When I visited the village church at Mizizah, near Mor Gabriel Monastery in the Tur ‛Abdin, in 2005, the elderly malfono accompanying me recognized one of the manuscripts as his own work, copied in the early 1960s when he was a young teacher in the village. This tradition continued in the many manuscripts written by the late Mor Yulius Çiçek (1941–2005), himself a disciple of the great scholar and scribe Mor Philoxenos Yuhanon Dolabani (1885–1969). Mor Yulius’ manuscript copies of important texts were in effect transitional media, created for the purpose of photographic reproduction and publication.39 What is fading in the Middle Eastern Christian world is far more evident in Ethiopia. During the original EMML (Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Library) project co-sponsored by my monastery in the 1970s, monks would bring their manuscripts to the central studio in Addis Ababa and wait while they were photographed. Among the manuscripts were found the oldest known copies of all of the books of the Old Testament, and also of some New Testament and apocryphal books. Many of these manuscripts were still in regular use. One monk from the Monastery of Hayk Estifanos pulled a small manuscript from his pocket and offered it for microfilming. It turned out to be the oldest known copy of the Ge‛ez

38 As Sebastian Brock illustrated in his identification of the French 19th century printed exemplar for a manuscript copied in 1902 in Alqosh: “A Note on the Manuscripts of the Syriac Geoponicon,” Oriens Christianus 51 (1967), 186–87, as cited in Brock, “Without Mushē of Nisibis, where would we be? Some reflections on the transmission of Syriac Literature,” Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 56 (2004), 22. 39 Including many liturgical and devotional texts published by Mor Ephrem Monastery through Bar Hebraeus Verlag (Glane/Lossar, Holland).

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version of the Book of Enoch.40 In Ethiopia many families still keep manuscript Dawits (Psalters) or other devotional works even if they now use printed books. In October 2005 I took a small group to Yeha, the preAxumite capital located in Tigray province, and happened upon three boys sitting on the ground reading aloud from a large Ge‛ez manuscript. Their monastic teacher sat under a nearby tree following along from another manuscript, correcting them as they read. This perfectly ordinary use of manuscripts is now unimaginable virtually anywhere else in the Christian world. Scribal communities continue to exist in Ethiopia, preserving and handing on traditional methods of book production. In the Armenian churches printed books have long replaced manuscripts in actual use, but manuscripts continue to play a unique role in the religious culture, holding a position sometimes compared to that of icons in churches of the Byzantine tradition. On a Sunday in April 2007, at the church in Mughni, not far from Yerevan, I witnessed the biennial visit of the Mughni Gospel, which has been kept in the Mashtots Matenadaran Institute for Ancient Manuscripts in Yerevan ever since the Soviet confiscation of manuscripts from churches and monasteries. The church was packed. A pathway had been cleared between door and sanctuary, guarded by those who had arrived early to secure a preferred spot. Excitement mounted until the manuscript finally arrived from Yerevan, along with numerous attendants and television cameras. Deacons and acolytes formed a phalanx around the priest who actually carried the Gospel, protecting him from the fervent worshippers straining to touch scarves and handkerchiefs to the classic Armenian-style silver cover of the manuscript. Such an event is unrepeatable in the west, where manuscripts have long ceased to bear such religious meaning and have in any case been consigned to research institutions from which they are rarely, if ever, removed.

MANUSCRIPTS AND THEIR ECCLESIASTICAL GUARDIANS With the move to printed books now complete in almost every part of the Christian Orient, the other pillar of manuscript culture, the ownership of manuscripts by their original communities, still stands, though it is diminished and threatened. Even after centuries of persecution as a religious minority in Islamic regions, and despite invasions and wars,

40

Also known as “1 Enoch”; MS. EMML 2080, 13th century.

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colonialism, the confiscation of Christian manuscripts by state authorities,41 and the transfer of thousands of manuscripts to western libraries, monasteries and church authorities in the Middle East still retain ownership of significant collections of manuscripts. In the Caucasus, where Soviet rule shifted ecclesiastical collections into national repositories (the Matenadaran in Yerevan and the Tbilisi Institute of Manuscripts, formerly known as the Kekelidze Library, in Georgia), the situation is more akin to that in the west, though at least in Armenia the church has managed to build a new and substantial collection at the Catholicosate in Etchmiadzin.42 Among the most significant collections still in ecclesiastical hands are those of the Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic Patriarchates in Jerusalem. The Greek Orthodox collection includes manuscripts from the various Orthodox monasteries in that cosmopolitan region, including those of Mar Saba.43 The Armenian collection is one of the most important in the world in terms of continuous ownership and quality, having benefitted from the offerings of royalty and pilgrims over the centuries.44 Located in the Old City of Jerusalem, not far from the Greek Orthodox collection, it shares with it the risks inherent in such a politically-charged environment. As one surveys the important church-held collections elsewhere in the Christian Orient, some broad patterns emerge in the nature and history of the holdings. Some collections were destroyed or dispersed in the 19th and 20th centuries, and others are at great risk today. Many of the surviving ecclesiastical libraries are aggregations of other church-held collections, including manuscripts rescued from now-extinct communities. Destroyed, Dispersed, and Endangered Collections. Surviving libraries should be celebrated, but not before pausing to mourn the destruction or removal of many thousands of manuscripts from other collections. Losses over several centuries from natural disasters and accidents, though tragic, are inevitable. Almost every ancient library has its stories of fire or flood. Destruction in time of war or persecution is more poignant, and the

41 E.g., in Turkey, where large collections of Armenian manuscripts are thought to have disappeared into state hands. 42 The Catholicosate’s collection of more than a thousand manuscripts is thus successor to the original ecclesiastical collection now at the Matenadaran. 43 The standard catalogue is that of Athanasios Papadopoulos-Kerameus (Petrograd, 1891–1915). 44 See the 11-volume catalogue by Norayr Bogharian published by the Gulbenkian Foundation.

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churches of the Christian Orient have had more than their share of such horrors down to the present moment. In the modern period, the destruction in 1915 of the Chaldean Catholic Episcopal library at Seert in Turkey (with the murder of its animating force and cataloguer, the learned Archbishop Addai Scher) is a particularly notorious case45; many more examples can be found in the destruction of Armenian communities in Turkey in the same period. Some of the Syriac manuscripts from Seert were sold to the Bibliothèque Nationale just before the loss of the rest of the collection46; some remnants of important Armenian libraries have been gathered at the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul,47 with even more preserved in Yerevan at the Matenadaran.48 The present catastrophe in Iraq has placed many ecclesiastical collections at great risk. Some had been moved for safekeeping even before the 2003 invasion, but the present situation of unrest throughout the country means that all collections, whatever their location, remain in grave danger. The massive emigration of Iraqi Christians to Syria, Jordan, and beyond, places a further stress on the safety of cultural patrimony, including manuscripts. The concentration of Christians and of significant libraries around Mosul, a flashpoint in the recent conflicts, is particularly worrying, since many of the manuscripts from now extinct Chaldean Catholic and Assyrian Church of the East communities in southeast Turkey are presumed to be in Mosul. The many manuscript collections in Lebanon, a place of refuge from persecution for centuries, managed to survive the Civil War of 1975–1990 45 See J.-M. Vosté, “Notes sur les manuscrits syriaques de Diarbékir et autres localités d’Orient,” Le Muséon 50 (1937), 347. On Addai Scher, see Rudolf Macuch, Geschichte der spät- und neusyrischen Literatur (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1976), 402–05. On the collection at Seert, as for all Syriac collections, see the references in Alain Desreumaux and Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet, Répertoire des bibliothèques et des catalogues de manuscrits syriaques (Paris: CNRS, 1991); a new edition is imminent. 46 See William F. Macomber, “New Finds of Syriac Manuscripts in the Middle East,” in Wolfgang Voigt, ed., XVII Deutscher Orientalistentag vom 21. bis 27. Juli 1968 in Würzburg. Vorträge, Teil 2, section 4, ZDMG Suppl. 1:2 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1969), 479. 47 Including manuscripts from the Istanbul region and from churches in Kayseri. See the (incomplete) report of Bernard Coulie, Répertoire des bibliothèques et des catalogues de manuscrits arméniens, Corpus Christianorum (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992), 90. The collection of over 500 manuscripts has been digitized with HMML and cataloguing is now underway. 48 Coulie, Répertoire, passim.

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better than might have been expected, with the sad exception of the Melkite Greek-Catholic Seminary at ‛Ain Traz and numerous examples of manuscripts stolen when monasteries were occupied during the Civil War,49 but the future looks very uncertain as Christians continue to emigrate in the face of a deteriorating political situation. This has made the digital preservation of Lebanon’s manuscript collections an urgent matter.50 Most of the major Syriac manuscript collections in southeast Turkey described by Scher,51 Vosté,52 Vööbus,53 or Macomber54 have been moved or dispersed as their Syriac Catholic, Chaldean, or Armenian communities have dwindled or disappeared. Significant collections remain in Syriac Orthodox hands, though not widely advertised for reasons of security.55 Despite energetic renovation of the monasteries and churches in the region, the manuscript collections must be considered at risk as local Christians continue to move to large cities (especially Istanbul) or to emigrate in search of economic opportunity. The growing Kurdish population places further pressure on the Christian minority as well as raising the volatility of the E.g., the theft of two choice Gospel manuscripts from the monastery at Balamand (MSS. 3 and 6), and the disappearance (with later demand for ransom) of many important manuscripts from the library at Deir Muqalles (Saint-Sauveur) in Joun, near Saïda. These stolen manuscripts remain unrecovered. The Balamand Collection has now been digitized with HMML. 50 Since 2003, HMML has been working with these Christian communities in Lebanon to digitize their manuscripts: the Antiochian Orthodox Church for the collection at Balamand and in the monasteries and churches of Mount Lebanon; the Armenian Apostolic Catholicosate at Antelias; the Armenian Catholics at Bzommar; the Melkite Greek-Catholic monks of Deir Mar Yuhanna (Chouerite Basilian), Khonchara, and of Deir esh-Shir (Aleppan Basilian) at Sarba in Jounieh; the Maronite Catholic collections of the Lebanese Maronite Order housed at the Université du Saint-Esprit, Kaslik, and of the Lebanese Missionary Order (Deir elKreim) in Jounieh; and the Bibliothèque Orientale at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut. The manuscripts of the Maryamite Maronite Order had previously been digitized by Brigham Young University, who began the work at the Bibliothèque Orientale and at Kaslik (HMML assumed management responsibility in 2004). 51 “Notice sur les manuscrits syriaques et arabes conservés à l’Archevêché Chaldéen de Diarbékir,” Journal Asiatique ser. 10, vol. 10 (1907), 331–62, 385–431. 52 J.-M. Vosté, “Notes sur les manuscrits syriaques de Diarbékir et autres localités d’Orient,” Le Muséon 50 (1937), 345–49. 53 Arthur Vööbus, “In Pursuit of Syriac Manuscripts,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 37 (1978), 187–93. 54 “New Finds,” 479–82. 55 A comprehensive digitization project is currently underway with HMML. 49

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political atmosphere in the region, with consequent risks to the churches, monasteries, and remaining manuscript collections. Aggregated and Rescued Collections. Some of the largest existing Christian manuscript libraries in the Middle East are aggregated collections. In Lebanon, the outstanding Bibliothèque Orientale at the Jesuit Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut is comparable in nature and scope to European research libraries, with manuscripts representative of the various Oriental Christian traditions as well as a substantial collection of Islamic manuscripts.56 The ecclesiastical libraries at the Armenian Catholic Clergy Institute of Bzommar57 and the Syriac Catholics at Deir Sharfeh58 house aggregations of various collections added to a core library dating from the 18th century. Some of those added materials are “survivor” collections or manuscripts, rescued from other places or remnants of once much-larger holdings. This is also the case with many other libraries in Lebanon and Syria, where refugees from persecution in Anatolia migrated in large numbers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bringing many of their manuscripts with them. The Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia, now located 56 Almost 1700 of the collection of approximately 3500 manuscripts have been catalogued by Louis Cheiko and Ignace-Abdo Khalifé as Catalogue raisonné des manuscrits historiques de la Bibliothèque Orientale de l’Université Saint-Joseph (Beirut, 1913– 1994). A digitization project, now managed by HMML, has been underway since 2002. 57 The collection of the former Antonine Congregation, kept at Ortaköy in Istanbul, was added to the main Bzommar collection; both have extensive catalogues in the Vienna Mechitarist/ Gulbenkian Foundation series (the original Bzommar collection by M. Keschischian, published in 1964 but compiled in the 1920s; the Antonine Collection by N. Akinian and H. Oskian, 1971), though the collection has continued to grow and contains hundreds of uncatalogued Arabic manuscripts. A project with HMML to digitize the entire collection at Bzommar will be completed early in 2009. 58 The foundational collection gathered by Patriarch Ignatius Michael III Jarweh (1730–1800) was augmented by a few manuscripts rescued from a fire at the Convent of Saint Ephrem Raghm in Chabanieh in 1841, and then most notably by the “Patriarchal” collection of Efrem Rahmani (1848–1929), transferred from Beirut in 1956. For an honest discussion of threats to the original collection, see Isaac Armalet’s Catalogue des Manuscrits de Charfet (Jounieh: Missionaires Libanais, 1936), 8–9. A new catalogue of the complete collection, filling out both Armalet’s work and that of Behnam Sony on the Rahmani collection (Beirut, 1993), is happily underway under the direction of Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet, Alain Desreumaux, and Muriel Debié.

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at Antelias, just north of Beirut, houses manuscripts brought from the historic base at Sis, in Cilician Anatolia.59 The Syriac Orthodox and Syriac Catholic collections in Aleppo contain many manuscripts rescued from Urfa and other sites in southeast Turkey.60 Much of the historic Syriac Orthodox Patriarchal collection migrated from Deir Ulzaferan (near Mardin in southeast Turkey) to Homs in NW Syria in 1924, then to Damascus in 1959, and more recently to the new complex at Mor Ephrem Monastery in Ma‛arat Sayyidnaya, north of Damascus. Included in the collection as it currently stands are some manuscripts from the monastery at Deir Ulzaferan as well as significant manuscripts from Saint Mark’s Church in Jerusalem, moved for safekeeping in 1967.61 There are also significant collections in the Middle East that have remained stable in location and composition. This is particularly the case in Syria, where Christianity has been long established in relatively peaceful conditions. Notable here are the collections in Aleppo belonging to the Antiochian (Greek) Orthodox Archbishopric,62 the Greek-Catholic Archbishopric (augmented by the remnant of the George Sbath Collection),63 the Armenian Cathedral of the Forty Martyrs,64 and the

59 The collection was catalogued by A. Tanielian in the Gulbenkian Foundation series (Antelias, 1984) and has been completely digitized with HMML. 60 See Vööbus, “In Pursuit,” 188. Both collections have been digitized with HMML; cataloguing is now underway. 61 See Yuhanna Dolabani, René Lavenant, Sebastian Brock, and Samir Khalil Samir, “Catalogue des manuscrits de la bibliothèque du patriarcat syrien orthodoxe à Homs,” Parole de l’Orient 19 (1994), 555–661. 62 See Arabic Manuscripts in the Metropolitan Library in Aleppo of the Greek Orthodox (Beirut: Institute for Antiochian Orthodox Studies, 1989 [in Arabic]), a catalogue of 183 manuscripts. 63 For the collection at the Archbishopric, see Francisco del Río Sánchez, Gregorio del Olmo Lete et al., Catalogue des manuscrits conservés dans la bibliothèque de l’archevêché grec-catholique d’Alep (Syrie), Sprachen und Kulturen des christlichen Orients (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2003). Half of the Sbath collection was given to the Vatican Library (mss. 1–776); the remainder of the collection is still in Aleppo (mss. 777–1324). The Archbishopric Collection has been completely digitized with HMML, and digitization of the Aleppo portion of the Sbath Collection is currently underway. 64See Coulie, Répertoire, 20–21.

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Maronite Archbishopric.65 The Antiochian Orthodox also have a major collection at their Patriarchate in Damascus.66

ORIENTAL CHRISTIAN MANUSCRIPTS IN THE WEST: THE SPECIAL CASE OF EGYPT A huge portion of the manuscript patrimony of the eastern churches has been transferred to western libraries over the past three hundred years. This has occurred both by purchase at what now seem to be risible prices or by outright theft. The historical circumstances of these transfers are inevitably complex, though in every case it could be argued that western collectors (and their eastern agents) exploited the greatly weakened circumstances of eastern Christian manuscript guardians. After centuries of Muslim rule, the Christian population was greatly diminished and ecclesiastical institutions (especially monasteries) had been severely degraded. Naturally, the ability to recognize the value of their manuscript holdings and to provide adequately for their safety was affected. The vast economic disparity between manuscript guardians and their European or American visitors, the leveraging of imperial power, and the use of mercenary local agents increased the disadvantage of those responsible for manuscript collections. It is only fair to note that manuscripts were sometimes in genuine physical danger because of a lack of perceived value or of resources for their proper care. In the 18th and 19th centuries Egypt was a particular target for western collectors of manuscripts, just as it was for archeologists and their sponsoring national museums. The particular climatic conditions that make Egypt (with Sinai) uniquely suited to long-term preservation of even very old manuscripts piqued the interest of scholars in search of ancient biblical and other manuscripts, a quest often prompted by their own theological and polemical interests. The story of Sinai’s fabulous manuscript collection, and of the murky circumstances in which Constantine Tischendorf obtained its ancient biblical codex in 1859, is well known. 65 There are more than 1500 manuscripts now kept at the Archbishopric; the 134 Syriac manuscripts have recently been catalogued by Francisco del Río Sánchez, Manuscrits Syriaques conservés dans la Bibliothèque des Maronites d’Alep (Syrie), Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies 5 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008). 66 See Arabic Manuscripts in the Patriarchal Library of Antioch and All the East of the Greek Orthodox (Beirut: Institute for Antiochian Orthodox Studies, 1988 [in Arabic]), a catalogue of 447 manuscripts.

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Though famous, Codex Sinaiticus is not the most dramatic example of the transfer of manuscripts from an Egyptian monastery to a European library. That distinction, of course, belongs to the Syriac manuscripts of Deir es-Suryan in the Wadi Natrun (site of the ancient monastic settlement known as Scetis, and inhabited by monks to this day). The progressive spoliation of that unique collection is one of the most thoroughly documented instances of western appropriation of significant Eastern Christian manuscripts. The story is all the more poignant because of how much is known about the formation of the collection before the Europeans came to Egypt. The presence of the Syriac monks in the Wadi Natrun, anomalous as it may have been, allowed a major Syriac manuscript collection to be created in climatic conditions highly favorable to their survival. The ninth century reestablishment of a Syrian monastery at Scetis by Marutha of Tikrit, and then its rebuilding later in the same century after the fifth sack of Scetis, began a period of continuous Syriac presence that lasted until the disappearance of the last Syriac-speaking monks by the mid-seventeenth century. Acquisitions can be dated from the latter part of the ninth century, with the most significant growth from the additions by Moses of Nisibis in the 930s.67 From the early 11th century onward the monastery was in steady decline owing to the several persecutions of Christians generally in Egypt, and the ensuing interruptions of communication between the monastery and Syriac communities in Mesopotamia. Coptic monks gradually took over the monastery. Evelyn White’s collation of colophons from the manuscripts and other evidence about the library from the modern catalogues of Assemani, Wright, and Zotenberg record various efforts to renew the manuscripts during relatively stable periods, as well as laments about the poor state of literary education as the number of monks dwindled.68 The collection became particularly vulnerable after the disappearance of the last Syriac-speaking monks by the mid-seventeenth century, a development which coincided with the discovery of the collection by European travelers. The first report of the significance of the library at Deir 67 Monica J. Blanchard, “Moses of Nisibis (fl. 906–43) and the Library of Deir Suriani,” in Studies in the Christian East in Memory of Mirrit Boutros Ghali, ed. L. S. B. McCoull, Publications of the Society for Coptic Archaeology (North America) 1 (Washington, 1995), 13–24; Sebastian Brock, “Without Mushē of Nisibis,” 15–24. 68 See Hugh G. Evelyn White, The Monasteries of the Wâdi ’n Natrûn, II: The History of the Monasteries of Nitria and of Scetis, ed. Walter Hauser (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 1932), 439–58.

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es-Suryan may be that of the French Capuchin Gilles de Loches, ca. 1630, who reported seeing a library in Wadi Natrun of 8000 volumes, some as old as the time of Antony the Great.69 The repeated attempts to purchase manuscripts, beginning with Elias Assemani’s mission for Pope Clement XI in 1707, make for absorbing though sometimes unedifying reading. Assemani, a native speaker of Arabic, could at least communicate directly with the monks. The nineteenth century British collectors and their agents, as representatives of the rising imperial power, were able to exert both psychological and economic pressure on the small, now entirely Coptic, community at the monastery. It is little surprise that such pressure proved successful. The story has been told by several narrators from various countries. Some of them were directly involved in the acquisitions (J. S. Assemani, Robert Curzon),70 others benefitted from them (William Cureton, William Wright),71 and others ruefully chronicled the success of their rivals (T.-J. Lamy, H. Lammes).72 Many of the classic elements of western encounters with the Orient are present in these accounts: disdain for the religious 69 As reported to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, according to Pierre Gassendi in Book 4 of his De Vita N.- G. Peireskii (Paris, 1641); see Assemani, Bibliotheca Orientalis, “Praefatio,” sec. 7. 70 Assemani, Bibliotheca Orientalis, “Praefatio,” secs. 6–7 and 11; Robert Curzon, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant (London: John Murray, 1849), Chapters 7–8: “Natron Lakes” with the famous account of Curzon’s visit in 1837 when he employed a sweet Italian liqueur to gain entry to the oil cellar and the vaulted room next to it where the great mass of Syriac manuscripts was kept, as first reported by Elias Assemani in 1707, visited by J. S. Assemani in 1715, and seen by Lord Prudhoe during his 1828 search for Coptic and Arabic manuscripts. Curzon managed to purchase three manuscripts. 71 William Cureton, “British Museum: MSS from the Egyptian Monasteries,” Quarterly Review 77, no. 153 (December 1845), 39–69 (the article includes a letter from Robert Curzon with a slightly different version of his 1837 visit), and the Preface to his edition of The Festal Letters of Athanasius (London: Society for the Publication of Oriental Texts, 1848), i-xxxiv; William Wright, Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum, Acquired since the Year 1838, Part 3 (London: Trustees, 1872), i-xxxiv. 72 T.-J. Lamy, “Les Manuscrits syriaques de Musée Britannique,” Bulletins de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 2nd ser. 49 (1880) 223–53; H. Lammes, “Les Manuscrits syriaques du désert de Nitrie,” Études religieuses, philosophiques, historiques et littéraires 64 (1896), 286–320. Lammes’ account has the easy flow of a (very lengthy) after-dinner speech.

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beliefs and practices of the local Christians, imputations of craftiness or avarice, the use of alcohol to lower resistance, persuading the guardians that cash was of more use to them than old books.73 The successful collectors were well aware of the scientific importance of the materials, and, not incidentally, of their value for enhancing institutional or national reputations in the fiercely competitive colonial period. Amidst the pride, and the congratulations that the manuscripts were “rescued from perishing in a vault in Africa,”74 one also finds frustration that even in Europe the great significance of these manuscripts might not be adequately recognized. J. S. Assemani lamented the reception accorded the first 40 manuscripts from Deir es-Suryan brought to Rome by his cousin Elias in 1707. Posturing experts, he fumes, disguised their weak grasp of the relevant languages by denigrating the textual value of the new acquisitions, further suggesting that the manuscripts should be destroyed lest they spread pestilence. They further claimed to be unable to read them because of their decrepit condition, exacerbated by Elias’ shipwreck on the Nile.75 Cureton, noting the dearth of scholars of Oriental languages in England, and the undervalued status of Syriac among their small number, admitted his “apprehension that these valuable works, although now safe from the danger of destruction, will now lie upon our shelves in almost as great neglect as they did in the oil-cellar of the monastery.”76 Fortunately, that did not prove to be the case, neither at the British Museum nor at the other locations where manuscripts from Deir es-Suryan are to be found

73 Though he never saw the library at Deir es-Suryan when he visited in 1778, the French naturalist Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt provides one of the most fiercely bigoted accounts in his Voyage dans la haute et basse Égypte (Paris: F. Buisson, an VII [=1798]). He devotes two chapters to Wadi Natrun (2:185–216), with contemptuous descriptions of Coptic monastic liturgies (2:189– 193) and repeated comments about avarice (e.g., 2:204–07, 214). In the description of Deir es-Suryan, the last monastery he visited, he allows that the monks there were “less filthy and stupidly fierce” than elsewhere (2:209). Westerners had no monopoly on prejudice : J. S. Assemani, himself Lebanese and a native speaker of Arabic, regarded the Egyptians as a whole to be “sly, crafty, and treacherous; most tenacious in both avarice and superstition” and considered the Copts, from his Catholic perspective, to be heretics (Bibliotheca Orientalis, sec. 7). 74 Cureton, “British Museum—Manuscripts,” 68. 75 Bibliotheca Orientalis, sec. 7. 76 Cureton, “British Museum—Manuscripts,” 68. At the time, he notes, there was no Chair of Syriac at either Oxford or Cambridge.

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today (the Vatican Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg). It is tempting to wonder if the many protective curses written over the centuries into the ownership inscriptions on the manuscripts may have had some effect. Elias Assemani’s boat accident on the Nile in 1707 killed one of his companions and damaged the 40 manuscripts he had purchased. His cousin J. S. Assemani lost much of his personal library in a fire in 1768, including materials for the eight unpublished volumes of the Bibliotheca Orientalis and most of the remaining copies of the four printed volumes.77 The first volume of Wright’s Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum was destroyed by a fire at the printer just as the last sheets had come off the press, and had to be entirely reset from a set of proofs.78 Whether they were cursed or not, it is unreasonable at this distance to judge the actions of those who took the manuscripts from Deir es-Suryan. Modern sensibilities about patrimony and cultural property would have been utterly incomprehensible to them. There were genuine physical threats to the manuscripts posed by the conditions in which they were kept, conditions indicative of the dire situation of ancient Christian monasteries close to their historical nadir. Happily, the fortunes of the Coptic Church of Egypt improved dramatically with the 20th century Coptic theological and pastoral revival, the recent repopulation of the monasteries, and a renewed interest in the manuscript heritage of the Coptic and Arabic Christian traditions. Deir es-Suryan retains a substantial collection of some 1000 manuscripts, mostly Coptic and Arabic, but including some Syriac manuscripts and recently-found fragments of the manuscripts now in Europe. Among them were missing sections of the famous final folio of MS. Add. 12,150 of the British Library, the oldest dated Syriac manuscript, identified at Deir es-Suryan by Sebastian Brock.79 The library at Deir esSuryan has skilled monastic leadership, now working in partnership with experts from around the world. The Monastery of Mar Mina in the Western Desert has become a center for manuscript conservation and restoration Odier, La Bibliothèque Vaticane, 159. Wright, Catalogue, 3:xxxiii-xxxiv. 79 Bigoul el-Souriani and Lucas van Rompay, “Syriac Papyrus Fragments Recently Discovered in Deir al-Surian (Egypt),” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 4 (2001); Martin Bailey, “Fragments of World’s Oldest Christian Manuscript Found in Egyptian Monastery,” The Art Newspaper 188 (February 18, 2008). I had the thrill of unexpectedly encountering Drs. Brock and Van Rompay at Deir es-Suryan in 2005 and viewing the recently identified fragments. 77 78

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serving the whole Coptic Church, and the Patriarchate in Cairo has built a modern library with a manuscript section. These are very encouraging signs. At the present time the Coptic community in Egypt is less threatened by emigration than churches elsewhere in the region, though the political situation in Egypt and the strength of Islamic fundamentalist movements have created recent problems and make for an uncertain future.

THE CONTINUING CHALLENGE Manuscript collections in the Christian Orient, though much better protected now than in the past, remain highly vulnerable. Manuscripts no longer in regular use are always in a precarious position. Everyone who has spent time in the field has heard stories of clergy or other custodians of manuscripts who have mistreated, burned, or thrown away “old books” or archival materials. Such occurrences are increasingly rare, though not entirely unknown even today when recognition of the value of historical materials, whether written, artistic, or architectural, can be trumped by allegedly pragmatic concerns presented as “pastoral” or “up to date.” Church leaders and educated clergy will appreciate the importance of guarding cultural patrimony, but this is not always the case at a parochial level. It is salutary to remember that in major western cities until quite recently, historic buildings, including churches, were routinely razed and replaced in the interest of modernization and greater efficiency. Furthermore, while large-scale transfer of cultural patrimony has been stopped by national legislation and international agreements, economic pressures continue to encourage the sale and (almost always illegal) export of manuscripts. Those responsible for manuscript collections in the Christian Orient may perceive the value of manuscripts, but lack the financial and knowledge-based resources for their care. When communities are threatened by emigration, political uncertainty, or violence, attention to manuscripts may seem a comparatively low priority. Economic conditions in a particular region can encourage theft of historic items for sale to tourists or collectors; manuscript collections become natural targets for such trading in looted artifacts, especially when the collections are kept in relatively unsecured conditions. Manuscripts are widely available for sale in antiquarian shops in the Middle East, which is legal as long as they are not stolen or intended for export without a license. The problem, of course, is provenance: manuscripts come from somewhere, and that is usually a church or monastery. The question of who sold them, and by what authority, is of critical importance. One hears regularly of manuscripts being

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offered for sale with visible ownership marks indicating recent removal from known collections. The situation is even more acute in Ethiopia. Recently, representatives of a major American library visited our cataloguer of Ethiopian manuscripts, Getatchew Haile, to ask his help in identifying a recent acquisition. The task was easy: he recognized the manuscript as one he himself had catalogued from the microfilm copy created by the Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Project in the 1970s, and he pointed out the EMML number still visible on the manuscript itself. Revolution and civil war, compounded by widespread famine, cast many Ethiopian manuscripts on to the international market, as a quick consultation of eBay or booksellers’ catalogues will demonstrate. Even hotel gift shops at the major tourist sites in Ethiopia today often have manuscripts for sale. Some may indeed have been purchased from their lawful owners (though surely for a pittance). Many others, perhaps most, were likely stolen from parishes or monasteries, sold by people who may have had desperate need for whatever they could earn from the sale. The issues related to manuscripts are paralleled by those associated with other kinds of cultural artifacts, as continuing controversies about classical antiquities and other archeological materials in western collections make clear. The questions are not new—the debate over the Elgin Marbles is one example of a longstanding concern for such issues—but they have become more vociferous since the introduction of legal protection for cultural patrimony through international treaties,80 national legislation, and bilateral agreements. As a result, it is now common to find governments like that of Italy successfully pressing their claims for objects recently looted from archeological sites and illegally sent abroad for sale to dealers and collectors. Treaties and legislation on cultural patrimony are not retroactive, but have nonetheless changed the terms of the debate on repatriation even of cultural artifacts exported long before legal prohibitions came into effect, leading to greater scrutiny of agreements between collecting institutions and the governments of the countries of origin (as in the case of the Machu Picchu artifacts taken to Yale University in the early twentieth century). In most instances, of course, there are no agreements to scrutinize, and this is especially the case with manuscripts (Tischendorf’s signature on the famous loan agreement at Sinai is a poignant exception). When one Such as the landmark 1954 Hague Convention on property dislocated by war and the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the illicit trade in cultural property. 80

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considers the particular case of the Christian manuscripts of the Middle East, the fact that they are not the artifacts of ancient civilizations important for modern conceptions of national identity has not helped their security. Given the precarious situation of many of the Christian communities in the Middle East, and the fraught political conditions in the Caucasus and in Ethiopia/Eritrea, international cooperation to protect the manuscript heritage of these ancient churches is imperative. It must be done in a manner that clearly respects the historical and cultural context of these collections and the proper rights of their guardians. It can contribute to heightened public awareness in the west of these traditions and of the present situation of their adherents, while at the same time serving the more specialized interest of scholars. Both Deir es-Suryan and Saint Catherine’s at Sinai are participating in major international projects to create digital reconstitutions of their lost manuscripts, uniting the membra dispersa now found in multiple locations. The librarian at Deir es-Suryan, Father Bigoul, noted, “People have been asking me if I am offended that these manuscripts are here in Britain but I am not. They have been conserved so well and through the digitising we can link the collections. It doesn’t matter where they are housed.”81 Despite his impressively eirenic tone, everyone would agree now that such manuscripts should remain in situ, with the creation of digital surrogates for the sake of wider access. Forty years ago, William F. Macomber concluded his survey of Syriac manuscript collections in the Middle East with these words: “I hope to spend several weeks in Turkey in the near future, and this time, at least, I plan to bring a camera. This is manifestly a crying need, that a photographic expedition be sent to the Middle East to preserve these treasures for posterity. There have been tragic losses in the recent past, and others are to be foreseen for the future.”82 Since his last visits to those libraries in 1966, the region has experienced the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, Lebanon’s Civil War, the Iran-Iraq War, the campaign against Kurdish separatists in southeast Turkey, two wars against Iraq, and the summer 2006 war between Israel and Hizbollah in Lebanon. No one can believe that the list will not 81 British Library Annual Report, 2001–2002 (London: The Stationery Office, 2002), 13. 82 “New Finds,” 482. After leaving the Middle East, Dr. Macomber became a cataloguer of Ethiopian manuscripts at HMML, and has recently deposited there the notes upon which he based his published report. These notes complement existing catalogues by Scher, Vosté, and others and are especially thorough for collections in northern Iraq.

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grow longer. If one adds Ethiopia’s Revolution and Civil War, the current threats to the integrity of Georgia, and political instability in Armenia, the prescience of Dr. Macomber’s appeal becomes striking, and its fulfillment even more imperative.

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p. 617, l. 6: the “Tbilisi Institute of Manuscripts” is most recently known as the “National Centre of Manuscripts” p. 623, l. 13: “their” should be “its”

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