The Byzantic Society for Paleographic Recovery

"We do not write for posterity. Posterity, on present evidence, is no longer reading."

Non posteritati scribimus; posteritas, ut videtur, iam non legit.

Of Our Foundation

The Byzantic Society for Paleographic Recovery is a small fellowship of working scribes — and one resident cat — devoted to the patient transcription of texts that the world has, by carelessness or impatience, allowed to go quiet. We hold no chair at any university. We hold, instead, a desk; and on the desk, a quire; and on the quire, a folio that is not yet finished.

Founded in the eighty-third year of indictment, our scriptorium continues a practice older than printing and considerably more humane: a single hand, a single pen, a single text, attended to slowly. We do not innovate; we transmit. The innovation, if there is to be one, is in the readers we recover.

Of Our Standards

Each manuscript is copied from a verified exemplar. Where the exemplar is doubtful, we say so in the margin. Where the exemplar is missing, we wait. Where the text itself is corrupt, we copy the corruption faithfully and add a marginal note, in red, drawing attention to the corruption — never silently emending. We hold this last point with some firmness; the silent emendation has done more damage to philology, in our judgement, than fire and water combined.

Our hand is conservative. Our minim-stroke is regular. Our ligatures are those of the Macedonian Renaissance, from which our paleographic vocabulary descends. We do not affect any of the more decorative ductus that have come into fashion since.

Of Our Aims

To copy is to read with one's hand; to copy is to read more slowly than is fashionable. We aim to read more slowly. The texts we choose are not always the texts that the academy chooses. We are partial to the homiletic, the liturgical, the gnomic, and the marginal. We are particularly fond of marginalia themselves — the small grumblings, blessings and curses that working scribes have left on their working folios — and a not-inconsiderable portion of these dispatches consists of recovering, dating, and contextualising such marginalia.

We do not solicit funding. We do not refuse funding either, when offered, but we have noticed that the offers are infrequent.

Of Our Pace

One folio per day, on a good day. Two folios per day, on a day with no visitors. No folios on the day of the cat's nameday. We do not keep a publication schedule because we do not believe in publication schedules; we keep, instead, a quietly cumulative record of what has been completed. The folios complete themselves, eventually.

Of What We Are Not

We are not a digital humanities project. We are not a critical edition. We are not a peer-reviewed journal. We are not — despite recurring confusion — the Bollandists; the Bollandists do excellent work and we wish them every success in it. We are also not, despite the name, located in Constantinople; the city of our foundation is more provincial, and we will not be drawn further on the matter.

We have, in particular, no opinion to offer on technology, except that the calamus suffices. The cat has additional opinions; they are not those of the desk.

If you have made it this far down the folio, the thanks of the desk are yours. There is, in our experience, nothing else to read here that you have not already read. Lector benigne, vale; opus tuum supra meum est.

Return to the dispatches