Initial Funding from LMU Munich

1. Today I got news that I will receive initial funding from my faculty at LMU Munich. I’m very grateful for this. It’s a comparatively small sum (around EUR 9,000). But it can already achieve quite a bit. I will use this funding to carry out preliminary work for a larger project dedicated to the provenance history of the diaspora manuscripts of St Catherine’s Monastery, for which I’m currently drafting the application. Here I will briefly provide a few details of what I’d like to achieve with the initial funding.

2. The main goal of the project on the provenance history of Sinai’s diaspora manuscripts is to create a reference work on this topic in the form of a monograph. The book will trace the translocation of the Sinai manuscripts chronologically and provide an overview of the manuscript corpus and its geographical distribution. It is intended to encourage and facilitate provenance-aware work with these manuscripts for the philological disciplines concerned. At the same time, I would also like to make a contribution to the current discussion on the ethical implications of dealing with contested handwritten cultural artefacts in the areas of collecting, trade, and research. The envisaged project will examine the historical preconditions for the translocation of manuscripts from the Sinai Monastery, shed light on the networks of all actors and institutions involved, and analyse the effects of their dispersion in the 20th and 21st centuries.

3. The most important tool for this work will be a handlist of all known diaspora manuscripts. I have already made a modest start with the Manuscripts resource page. In the coming months, however, I will be able to carry out a systematic inventory with the support of a student assistant. The approximately 40 known collections will be categorised into small (with less than 10 Sinaitic manuscripts), medium (with 10 to 25 manuscripts), and large (with 25 or more manuscripts). The handlist is primarily based on catalogues and similar sources. It will record basic data on codicology, texts, and provenance. This will already allow me to make some preliminary quantifications.

4. The funding also enables me to visit four of the five largest collections with Sinaitic diaspora manuscripts. In the UK, these are the Cadbury Research Library in Birmingham (Mingana Collection) and the British Library in London. Two others are in Italy, namely the Biblioteca Vaticana and the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. I’m really looking forward to these trips and will be reporting on them here on the blog. In these collections, I not only intend to inspect manuscripts, but also archive material that may provide information about acquisition processes and the people that were involved in them.

5. If all this preliminary work goes well, I will have created a solid basis for the subsequent project. I’m very excited to examine some manuscripts autoptically, which I have known so far only as digital copies, and to research their connections to other holdings in other collections.

Published: 4 June 2025. Last updated: 5 June 2025. Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0. Download PDF

Peter Tarras

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