Book Description

Excerpt from The Mozarabic Psalter (Ms. British Museum, Add. 30, 851) Thus far my scheme was plain, and, if accurately executed, adequate to present the reader with the best practicable substitute for the original ms. The attempt to render the text more intelligible by notes and by obelizing scribes' errors deserves some little further explanation and perhaps apology. Remembering always that I was reproducing a ms. And not editing a text - a task for which the materials were not available, even if I had had the requisite knowledge - my aim has been to encumber the text as little as possible either by obeli or notes. At the same time I did not wish the reader to be puzzled by blunders the explanation of which'was readily accessible. On these principles the text of the psalter and canticles, except for a few obvious slips of the scribe which I have obelized, is left to stand upon its own merits. Indeed its structure would make any system of indicating divergencies from the normal text a matter of useless complexity, even were there standard critical texts of its two chief components (the Roman and Old Latin psalters) available for comparison, which unfortunately is not the case. In the case of the hymns on the other hand, far more material is at hand, and I h0pe that the difficulties of their reading and interpretation may be materially lessened by the many variants which I have extracted from the collections of Blume and Dreves (ana/acta Hym7zz'ca, see esp. Vol. Xxvii) and from Dressel's edition of and perhaps by an occasional emendation of my own. For the critical basis of those editors' readings the student will of course turn to the editions themselves. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.