Grumbling

This post begins with a grumble.The famous Vat.lat. collection of the pope's Latin books in Rome numbers about 15,000, of which 4,026 or well over a quarter are so far online. The Vat.lat. series forms about one sixth of the entire Vatican manuscript library. That progress in digitization would be a cause for great celebration if it were not for the architecture of the online portal.

I have now reached the state where my fairly good computer and my high-speed internet connection can no longer reliably download and compare the Vat.lat. index page with its absurdly long list of 4,026 items, even when I block the images. Loading the index page takes up to a minute.

The solution ought not to be difficult. The series needs to be listed in 1000-manuscript chunks:  1-999, 1000-1999, 2000-2999 and so on. Until our technical friends at the Vatican realize that no one on the internet nowadays serves single pages with 4,026 images and reorganizes the indices in a more rational fashion, I am not going to be able to monitor for updates.

As a result, all that I have this week for you are 10 items from the other Vatican sub-collections:

1. Reg.lat.101 contains keys to bible study, including Brito de vocabulis byblie secundum ordinem alphabeti
2. Reg.lat.1424, an 8th or 9th century compilation of the classics starting with the famous forged exchange of letters between Seneca and St Paul, and including a poetic bit of the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius
   
   Check out the tweet by @ParvaVox with more details.
3. Reg.lat.1464, Cicero, De Officiis and other works
4. Reg.lat.1643, Solinus, De mirabilibus mundi
5. Reg.lat.1660, poetry, Italian
6. Reg.lat.1662, begins with Caecus in limine, a whodunnit from Pseudo-Quintilian
7. Reg.lat.1679, Vergil, Eclogae, with a flyleaf reused from an old uncial missal, here the words "et presta ut sacrificium"
   
8. Reg.lat.1680, Plautus, Comedies
9. Sbath.34, an Arabic manuscript from the collection of the famed Father Paul Sbath
10. Urb.lat.1101, letters, first date 1631, in Italian

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 145. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to DigiVatLib.