Our obscure 11th century Greek cleric, Demetrius, Metropolitan of Cyzicus, had the good fortune to have a poem addressed to him by Christopher of Mytilene.  The latter was a contemporary poet who w…

Independent scholar Alex Hourani tells me that he has created a Greek text  from manuscripts of a largely unpublished medieval text.  The anti-heretical work, which is referred to under various tit…

An interesting post on Twitter by Gregory Crane of the Perseus project leads to some interesting finds: The Scaife viewer build on work by @PonteIneptique. It would be easy to import the texts into…

In the process of studying the Antinoopolis Charioteers papyrus, I spent some time with other papyri containing texts related to the Alexander Romance. I say “related to” the Alexander …

Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more

Luke J. Stevens is an independent researcher who is publishing interesting material in the JTS, JECS and other significant journals.  Thankfully this is all accessible through his personal website,…

The Acts of St Phileas record the events of 305 AD during the Great Persecution under Diocletian.  An ancient Latin translation exists, but in the 20th century two Greek versions of the Acts were d…

Corpus Numericum Gemmorum Antiquorum   Dans l'Antiquité, les pierres précieuses et semi-précieuses furent largement appréciées pour leurs...

On October 28, 2023, one of the world’s most important research libraries effectively disappeared from the internet. The attack was not a temporary outage: it crippled the British Library’s digital…

This policy reaffirms the British Library's commitment to making metadata as open as possible.

A truly interesting and very well-written article has appeared in Early Medieval History this month.  Fortunately it is open-access.  The article is T. Dailey & Justin Piggott, “Ascetics, slave…

Modern apocrypha are fun!  You know the sort of thing – things like the Archko Volume, or the Aquarian Gospel, or any one of a hundred or a thousand similar items.  They’re all modern, …

In Bede’s Ecclesiastical History book 3 chapter 29, he quotes a letter from Pope Vitalian to the Anglo-Saxon King Oswiu, encouraging him to adopt the new simpler Roman calculation of the date…

There are two long encomia / eulogies on St Colluthus.  The first of these exists in English already.  The second, by Bishop Phoebammon or Phoibamon, acting as deputy in the 6th century for the exi…

I’ve started to look at the modern critical edition of the texts around St Colluthus.  This was printed a decade ago  in 2013 in the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (CSCO) volume …

St Colluthus was a Coptic physician who was tried and executed in 314 AD.  This was part of the great persecution of Christians ordered by the emperor Diocletian.  The original court record survives, ...

An interesting email this morning from W. C. Muenchow IV of truetestament.org: I'm writing to let you know about ... the first complete English translation of Adolf von Harnack's textual reconstruct...