Uncial manuscript

“ It is therefore no wonder that only a small fraction of the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament preserved to modern times were written in the uncial period, and but few of this number belong to the first five or six centuries, none being earlier than the age of Constantine. Most uncial manuscripts are more or less fragmentary; and till lately not one was known which contained the whole New Testament unmutilated. A considerable proportion, in numbers and still more in value, have been brought to light only by the assiduous research of the last century and a half. ”

“ Ages, except in the Church alone, who seem to have kept up the production of manuscript books principally for ecclesiastical and medical purposes was complete. Hence, any information pertaining to those epochs about ink, writing materials and ink writings, must be sought for in the undestroyed records and the ink writings themselves left by the fathers of the Church. All else is tainted and of doubtful authority. ”

“ In the next year five hundred and fifty-five additional manuscripts were given by him to the Library, and in 1640 eighty-one more. This splendid donation of nearly thirteen hundred manuscripts comprised works in Oriental and many other languages; a large number of them being of exceptional value and interest. Among them was a manuscript of the Acts of the Apostles in Greek and Latin, of the end of the seventh century, which is believed to have been once in the possession of the Venerable Bede. ”

“ To return now to classical forms of manuscripts, it appears to have been a long time before the book or codex form of manuscript was extended from the wood and ivory tablets to writings on parchment or paper.
The roll form of MS.It seems probable that throughout the Greek period manuscripts on paper or vellum were usually, if not always, in the shape of a long roll; and that it was not till about the beginning of the Roman Empire that leaves of parchment or paper were sometimes cut up into pages and bound together in the form of the older tablets. ”

“ Those who have been long accustomed to inspect and examine ancient manuscripts acquire a certain tact in judging of the age of a book from the condition of the ink, its colour and composition, which cannot be explained to others, and for the exercise of which no rules can be laid down. But in cases where a fraud is suspected, this nice habit of the eye often detects at once the imposition. It is perhaps more practicable to give to a picture, than to a manuscript, the hue of antiquity by artificial means. ”

“ That manuscript had a curious history and certainly deserves a place in a Museum. I heard lately that Gabriel Wells, [Pg 75] the American collector, has got hold of it. J. C. had made alterations in black ink, the magazine editor had gashed it horribly in red; and when the book publisher came to restore the mangled corpus he could do so, intelligibly for the printer, only by an extravagant use of green ink. You see, there was no duplicate copy of the original. Always make duplicates. If you don’t, and if you are a writer of J. C.’s size, your manuscripts may some day be priceless. ”

“ It had therefore now to be unrolled afresh and to be re-rolled into its normal shape—a troublesome process which the lazy man shirked, and which the careful man accomplished by making the revolutions with his two hands while he held the revolving material steady under his chin.
Although the codex or manuscript in book-form began to make its way in Greek and Roman literature as early as the 1st century of our era, the roll maintained its position as the recognized type of literary document down to the 3rd, and even into the 4th, century, when it was altogether superseded. ”

“ The number of abbreviations increases considerably during the eighth century. Previously the only symbols found in calligraphic majuscule manuscripts are the “Nomina Sacra” (deus, dominus, Iesus, Christus, spiritus, sanctus) , which constantly occur in Christian literature, and such suspensions as are met with in our fragment. A familiar exception is the manuscript of Gaius, preserved in the Chapter library of Verona, MS. xv (13) . This is full of abbreviations not found in contemporary manuscripts containing purely literary or religious texts. ”

“ But at an early date the Christian Church adopted this form as the more convenient one and gave it its circulation."25 The fact that parchment and vellum increased in cost and became less and less available as writing material led to the custom, during periods of the Middle Ages, of transcribing one work over another, and after the earlier had been obliterated. This "composite" writing was a "palimpsest," called, technically, a codex rescriptus, and many times obscured or destroyed an ancient and valuable production. ”

“ As he was to be off again next morning, there was no time to have it copied, at least by one hand: so the manuscript was cut up and distributed among a number of scribes, and in the space of a night the desired copy was ready. Subsequently Wimpfeling heard of the incident from one of the brethren in the monastery, and obtained the original manuscript to publish. When such things could happen, no wonder that some manuscripts are imperfect and others have disappeared. ”

“ In the Parisian reprint of the Benedictine Chrysostom (Par. Ben. 2) , the Editor has occasionally, but not constantly, recurred to the manuscripts, rarely gives the preference to the text of A. B. C., and constantly assumes the inferiority of those copies, in contents and authenticity as well as in antiquity, to the manuscript (E) , which furnished the Latin version of Erasmus, and in substance, as we have explained, the printed text of the original. ”

“ The library now contains almost 400,000 printed volumes, and about 30.000 manuscripts. The number of separate works exceeds a million. But the number of volumes conveys a very inadequate idea of the valuable character of the collection. In the department of Oriental manuscripts it is perhaps superior to any other European library; and it is exceedingly rich in other manuscript treasures. It possesses a splendid series of Greek and Latin editiones prindpes, and of the earliest productions of English presses. ”

“ A Latin manuscript of the seventh century has a high dot ( ̇) equivalent to a comma, a semicolon used as at present, and a dot accompanied by another dot or a dash to indicate the end of a sentence. A Latin manuscript of the ninth century shows the comma and an inverted semicolon ( [;] ) having a value between the semicolon and colon. Mediæval manuscript pointing, therefore, approximates modern forms in places, but lacks standardization into recognized systems.
The spread of printing brought new needs into prominence. ”

“ While discussion respecting the printing of the Museum Catalogue was proceeding, the character of the catalogue itself was undergoing modification. Great additions were daily being made to the number of books. The new entries thus rendered requisite were at first made in the old manuscript catalogue of additions interleaved with the original printed catalogue of Sir Henry Ellis and Mr. Baber. Two alphabetical series of titles, one printed and the other manuscript, were thus comprised within the same volumes. ”

“ Every book should be written twice, the first draft being made on soft unglazed paper with a No. 2 pencil, while the second is a revised and punctuated copy, written in ink or type-written on sheets of a medium size. The neatness of a manuscript has much to do with its favorable reception at the hands of an editor or a publisher's reader. Some authors do not write at all, but dictate to a stenographer or an amanuensis ”

“ The superiority of the inks known to the ancients has long been the object of surprise and admiration. The inscriptions on mummy-cases, made at a time long antedating the Christian Era, and the writing on manuscripts made in the early centuries of Christian history, in addition to the beauty of the form and finish of the writing, have a freshness of appearance as though they were only of years' instead of centuries' duration. ”

“ After having given the reader some notion of the collection of printed works, I should like now to invite him to accompany me through the Manuscript Department of the Museum. But I am afraid that I shall make a bad guide here; for the Museum is still without a descriptive catalogue of the Hebrew manuscripts, which is the only means of enabling the student to obtain a general view of the number and nature of these works. The manuscript catalogue of Dukes goes only as far as 1856. ”

“ Small horns to hold black and red ink; see fig. 53 on page 209.
Colour-box, palette, pigments, gold leaf and media of various kinds.
Sponge and pumice-stone for erasures. Paintings of scribes. Miniatures representing a scribe writing a manuscript are the commonest of all subjects in several classes of illuminated manuscripts. For example the first capital of Saint Jerome's Prologue in the historiated Anglo-Norman Vulgates almost always has a very minute painting of a monastic scribe [22] , seated, writing on a sloping desk, with his pen in one hand and his penknife in the other [23] . ”

“ If cards have already been adopted in the library to be catalogued, their form need not be changed. They may be placed in the hands of the printer without being transcribed. A manuscript catalogue for constant use should generally be upon cards. A very convenient method of keeping them is that employed by Mr. Folsom in the Boston Athenæum. The cards are long and narrow; are so perforated that they may be strung upon cords, which, being elastic, allow free motion without displacement; and are kept in cases, made to resemble folio volumes, one side of which opens like the cover of a book. ”

“ The space required for the indices, however, would not have greatly differed from that taken by the index of Book III in both the Morgan fragment and the Codex Bellovacensis.
6 4. Many of our oldest Latin manuscripts have two and even three columns on a page, a practice evidently taken over from the roll. But very ancient manuscripts are not wanting which are written in long lines, e.g., the Codex Vindobonensis of Livy, the Codex Bobiensis of the Gospels, or the manuscript of Pliny’s Natural History preserved at St. ”

“ This method of writing would be quite different from the laborious method of cutting inscriptions on bronze plates with a chisel and hammer, or with a graver.
A scribe could write on the soft white metal with a sharp stilus almost as easily and rapidly as if he were using pen and ink on paper, and the manuscript thus produced would have the advantage of extreme durability. ”

“ Three or four volumes of the manuscript catalogue having been selected to be combined in a volume of print, they undergo in the first place a literary revision. Queries respecting headings, authorship, and date are raised and settled, mistranscriptions and wrong punctuation corrected, and the catalogue is weeded of its practically duplicate entries by cutting these down to the mere phrase "another edition; another copy," as the case may require. A second and more troublesome revision then becomes necessary, for the order of the entries frequently admits of great improvement. ”

“ The most ancient, artistic miniatures of which we know are those on a manuscript of a part of the book of Genesis; it is in the Imperial Library at Vienna, and was made at the end of the fifth century. In the same collection there is a very extraordinary manuscript, from which I give an illustration.
This manuscript is a treatise on botany, and was written by Dioskorides for his pupil, the Princess Juliana Anicia, a granddaughter of the Emperor Valentine III. As this princess died at Constantinople a.d. 527, this manuscript dates from the beginning of the sixth century. ”

“ The capitalization and punctuation of the manuscripts have not been followed, and the division into paragraphs does not appear in the originals. The variants are noted, not only from B and C, but also from the later editions of the document. D is an edition in manuscript found among the collections made by Sir Simonds D'Ewes between 1623 and 1650. [19] It now occupies folios 95 and 96 of the manuscript in the Harleian collection numbered 311. ”

“ Merovingian, Lombard, and Anglo-Saxon scripts offer each their own Abbreviations, not to speak of the unique scotica manus or libri scottice scripti (Irish hand, or books written in the medieval Irish hand) . Eventually such productive centres of technical manuscripts as the Papal Chancery, the theological schools of Paris and Oxford, and the civil-law school of Bologna set the standards of Abbreviations for all Europe. The medieval manuscripts abound in Abbreviations, owing in part to the abandonment of the uncial, or quasi-uncial, and the almost universal use of the cursive, hand. ”

“ Yet nothing less than this is claimed for it by writers, who yet have bestowed [pg 284] much thought and labour on this controversy. “Seeing that the Vatican manuscript does not contain one single passage that can be demonstrated to be spurious, or that by the evidence of other manuscripts and of the context, admits of just doubt as to its authenticity, a position that no other manuscript enjoys, man is bound to accept the testimony of that manuscript alone, as his present text of the sacred record, wherever he possesses its teaching296.” ”