This winter we’ve released a new document we’ve been working on for a while. It’s a born digital publication, in the sense that this document to our knowledge has never been published previously. The edition and annotations here were produced by Elizabeth Platte (Reed College) and Rebecca S. Krawiec (Canisius College) directly from digital photographs of the manuscript for digital publication.
Read the manuscript transcription or the normalized text, or query it in our database.
It’s a section of one of Shenoute’s texts for monks in volume three of his monastic Canons. This 14-page (seven-folio) fragment now resides in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and originally derives from the White Monastery codex known by the siglum MONB.YB. We’ve released text and annotations for pages 307-320, which equate to the BN call number Ms Copte 130/2 ff. 51-57. Digital photos are now available online at Gallica.
We’ve transcribed the text from images of the manuscript and then annotated it for manuscript information. We’ve also broken the text down into the Coptic phrases known as “bound groups,” words, and morphs. Then we’ve annotated it all for part of speech, loan words (Greek, Latin, etc.), and lemmas.
By “we” I mean primarily Platte and Krawiec . Schroeder and Zeldes provided editorial review, as per our policy of having every published digital document reviewed by at least one editor.
As far as we know, this fragment has never been published; nor has any translation ever been published. We don’t have a translation yet, either.
As the first born-digital edition, this document is an experiment for us. Everything else we’ve worked with has been published in an edition, and sometimes even has an English translation that another scholar has published. Even though we digitize from the original manuscript, previous editions and translations make the transcription, annotation, and editing process much easier. This document is an unknown quantity.
This means we expect to have errors and welcome feedback on the document.
We also have no translation as of yet. Our goal is to translate the document and then edit the transcription and annotations again as we work. We hope to publish an essay on how the digital annotation process affected the creation of an edition.
In the meantime, use it to practice your Coptic. Let us know if you find errors. We’ll credit you.
