- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
In 1345 he personally discovered a collection of Cicero’s letters not previously known to have existed, the collection Epistulae ad Atticum, in the Chapter Library (Biblioteca Capitolare) of Verona Cathedral
So basically a guy goes into a library, rummages for a while, and finds ~1400 years old text no one knew was there
Do we still have places that store texts (like libraries, but doesn’t have to strictly be a library) where we don’t have everything catalogued and we don’t know what might be inside?
Not sure if this is QUITE what you meant, but we’ve got some we’re still not sure how to read without destroying which could be priceless and entirely undiscovered pieces of Classical literature.
Thank you, but not exactly. I am more wondering if in general we know what texts we have. Being unable to read does not mean we don’t know about it
To rephrase the question: do we know that for example most of collections are catalogued, we just are not sure what some texts are
or maybe we know that there are many/few where some work might be just lying on a shelf without anyone aware it is there
Ah, in that case, yes, but not so much European libraries. Most European collections are pretty well-categorized and catalogued at this point, including private collections. However, some places, like Mali, still have massive archives that we can read (or rather, at least specialists can read), and have access to, but much of the material is unknown and uncatalogued simply because of decentralized storage and a lack of scrutiny until relatively recently.
A-ha! That’s what I’ve been looking for :) Thank you
Do we know about other such chronicles? (Do we have an index of such chronicles? ;D )
I don’t know of any list or index of such resources, unfortunately. I do know that there are similar caches of texts in Ethiopia, especially Ethiopian monasteries, and, though less expansive, also on the Swahili Coast.