Byzantine News

Dumbarton Oaks and the HILL MUSEUM & MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY (HMML) announce a new four-week intensive introduction to Syriac language and paleography, July 10 to August 6, 2016. The program, sponsored and funded by Dumbarton Oaks, will be hosted at HMML, located on the campus of Saint John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota. The summer school will include a long weekend in Washington, DC, to visit Dumbarton Oaks and other institutions in the area to learn more about their resources for Byzantine and Eastern Christian studies. Approximately ten places will be available to doctoral students and recent PhDs, including including early-career faculty members, who can demonstrate the value of Syriac for their teaching and research. All costs apart from travel to and from Saint John's University (nearest airport: Minneapolis-St Paul) will be covered by Dumbarton Oaks, including the weekend in Washington, DC. Mornings will be devoted to Syriac language instruction by Prof. Sc...

From the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library here is a set of fantastic tools: SCHOOL offers lessons in paleography, codicology, and transcription.  FOLIO provides annotated manuscript pages for study and practice in transcription.  LEXICON explains terms used in manuscript studies.  REFERENCE contains bibliography and links to digitized print resources. Enjoy!

From California University Press a new book by Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent  Missionary Stories and the Formation of the Syriac Churches. This book analyzes the hagiographic traditions of six missionary saints in the Syriac heritage: Thomas, Addai, Mari, Simeon of Beth Arsham, Jacob Baradaeus, and Ahoudemmeh. Saint-Laurent studies a body of legends about missionaries' voyages in the Syrian Orient and illustrates their shared symbols and motifs. Revealing how these texts encapsulate the concerns of the communities that wrote them, she draws attention to the role of hagiography as a malleable genre that was well suited for the idealized presentation of the beginnings of Christian communities. Hagiographers, through their reworking of missionary themes, assert autonomy, orthodoxy, and apostolicity for their individual civic and monastic communities, posturing themselves in relationship to the rulers of their empire and other competing forms of Christianity. She argues that...

Meyer, Mark. A Comparative Dialectical Study of Genitive Constructions in Aramaic Translations of Exodus The purpose of this book is to "mine the gold" in multiple Aramaic translations of the biblical book of Exodus. The pages within reveal important similarities and differences between five Aramaic dialects in the use of genitive constructions: Targum Onkelos, the Syriac Peshitta, three corpora of the Palestinian Targum, the Samaritan Targum, and fragments of a Christian Palestinian Aramaic translation of Exodus. The book argues that there are three primary Aramaic genitive constructions that translate the construct phrase in Hebrew: the construct phrase, the genitive adjunct phrase with d-, and the genitive phrase with d- anticipated by a possessive suffix on the head noun (cataphoric construction). One important finding is that all the Aramaic dialects, except Samaritan Aramaic, use the adjunct genitive construction when the second member denotes the material compositio...