FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   >>  
all the MSS. we now have. He also read a tract attributed to Plutarch, called the _Instruction of Trajan_; it was probably not by Plutarch, but it was an ancient work, and is now lost. Petronius Arbiter was known to him, even that longest and most interesting piece of Petronius called the _Supper of Trimalchio_, for which our only authority is the late paper MS. at Paris that was found in Dalmatia in the seventeenth century. But no medieval English scholar can be shown to have read Tacitus, or the lost parts of Livy, or Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, or others of the rarer Latin authors. Next for Christian antiquity. The Vercelli MS. gives a poetical version in Anglo-Saxon of the Acts of St. Andrew in the land of the Anthropophagi which have ceased to exist in Latin (so, too, AElfric knew, and rejected, a poem on the adventures of St. Thomas in India). In one of its Homilies the same Vercelli MS. presents us with a translation of the Apocalypse of St. Thomas, a book of which until recently only the name was known. Two early MSS. contain short quotations in Latin from Cosmas Indicopleustes, a traveller of Justinian's time whose work remains only in a few copies, and is in Greek. Another has a fragment of the lost _Book of Jannes and Jambres_; another a chapter of the _Book of Enoch_, valuable as one of our few indications that a Latin version of it was current. John of Salisbury quotes a story about St. Paul which seems to come from the ancient apocryphal Acts of that Apostle. First on the list (twelfth century) of the library of Lincoln Minster (but lined through as if subsequently lost) is a title _Proverbia Grecorum_. What this book was is obscure; probably it was a translation from Greek by an Irish scholar. It is quoted extensively by Sedulius, the Irishman, and also in a collection of treatises by an unknown York writer (the Germans call him the _Yorker anonymus_) of the eleventh to twelfth centuries. The work of Irenaeus _Against Heresies_ (we only have it complete in Latin) was always rare, but there were at least two copies of it in England, one in the Carmelites' Library at Oxford, the other given by Archbishop Mepham to Christchurch, Canterbury. The latter, I believe, we still have in the Arundel collection in the British Museum. The MS. of Tertullian which Gelenius got from England is gone, and our knowledge of the treatise _On Baptism_ which it contained depends wholly on his printed text. I cannot doubt t
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   >>  



Top keywords:

scholar

 

century

 

collection

 

copies

 
twelfth
 

version

 

Thomas

 

translation

 

Vercelli

 

England


Petronius

 

Plutarch

 

called

 
ancient
 
Sedulius
 
Proverbia
 

Irishman

 

printed

 

subsequently

 

extensively


obscure

 

quoted

 

Grecorum

 
quotes
 

Salisbury

 

indications

 
current
 
library
 

Lincoln

 
Minster

apocryphal
 

Apostle

 
writer
 

Baptism

 
Christchurch
 

Canterbury

 

Mepham

 
Archbishop
 

Oxford

 

contained


treatise

 
Museum
 

Tertullian

 

Gelenius

 
British
 

knowledge

 

Arundel

 

Library

 
Carmelites
 

eleventh