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Here you'll find materials relating to my doctoral project (2011-2018) "Towards a first digital edition of the oldest surviving manuscript of St Augustine's De civitate Dei". While I don’t have permission to publish the images of the manuscript online, my semi-diplomatic transcription is available to download and reuse from this GitHub repository.

The manuscript is housed at the Biblioteca Capitolare in Verona, Italy, where it is catalogued as MS XXVIII (26). It is the oldest surviving manuscript of St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei contra Paganos. Augustine wrote De civitate Dei in 22 books but MS XXVIII(26) preserves only books 11-16.

While we have no concrete evidence of its exact production date, codicological and palaeographical studies place it sometime around or after 420 CE. It is, therefore, contemporary to Augustine himself. One of the oldest uncial manuscripts in existence (C.L.A. 4 p. IX), MS XXVIII(26) is made up of 253 folia or leaves and measures 290 x 190mm. It’s held together as a codex by parchment binding and is in an overall fairly good condition. It preserves annotations (scholia) by Archdeacon Pacificus. The text doesn’t make use of word breaks (scriptura continua), punctuation nor chapter divisions but contains rare abbreviations and interesting linguistic features. The low quality of the parchment, as well as the many spelling and grammatical mistakes present throughout the text, suggest this work was a study-copy rather than a deluxe codex.

The manuscript is in fairly good condition with the exception of a few severely damaged leaves. The damage is partly natural, partly artificial. Ink corrosion and bleed-through, as well as humidity marks, are classic examples of natural degradation. Ink corrosion is due to a chemical reaction produced by the ink itself, which slowly eats into the parchment. If the pages are very thin, the text on the verso bleeds through the recto producing a mesh of characters and thus making it very difficult to read. There are two types of corrosion in this manuscript: one is a result of the ‘original’ ink, the other of a restoration process carried out in the 1920s at the Vatican Library. In an attempt to read the faded text, conservators of the time, following restoration techniques of the early 1900s, covered the illegible sections with a chemical substance, which allowed the temporary retrieval of the text but ultimately caused even more damage.