Prolegomena to a new edition of Didymus (?), De Trinitate

The last complete critical edition of the De Trinitate once attributed to Didymus the Blind (CPG-2570) was the editio princeps published in 1769 by Mingarelli. The present article provides a progress report on a new edition currently in preparation. It begins with an assessment of the existing editions, not only Mingarelli’s but also the two partial editions published in 1975, highlighting several errors in the latter. It then proceeds to a discussion of the first three folios of the manuscript preserving this treatise which are badly damaged. Special imaging techniques have been applied to these opening folios in an attempt to recover the faded text. Pulsed thermography proved ineffective but ultraviolet light was successful in illuminating portions of text invisible to earlier editors. The article provides an analysis of several new readings that have been recovered and concludes with a draft edition of the first three folios

General interest · Cultural Heritage Materials Analysis · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History of Medicine Studies