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Kim Haines-Eitzen Engendering Pal impsests Reading the Textual Tradition of the Acts of Paul and Thecla In January 1892 twin sisters Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, scholars of Semitic languages from Cambridge, made their first of many trips to St. Catherine ’s monastery in Sinai.1 The primary aim of their visit was to study the manuscripts in the library and to photograph the Syriac codex of the Apology of Aristides discovered earlier by James Rendel Harris. But their most significant discovery on this trip came not from rummaging through the monastic library; rather, it occurred at the dining table. I quote here at length from the story, as told by Lewis and Gibson’s biographer, A. Whigham Price (italics are mine): Hospitality in an all-male community, though cordial, is apt to be of a somewhat rough-andready kind. At St Catherine’s, meals tended to be served on the firm principle that one eats to live, and no more. Butterdishes, for instance, were scorned: when, at breakfast, butter was required , it was simply planked down on an old sheet of discarded manuscript, and put thus on the table. After all, vellum is a tough material, and will resist grease for at least the period of one meal; and its use reduces the washing-up. Such, at any rate, was the monks’ normal custom , and they saw no reason to vary it for their feminine visitors. They had been so long out of the world that they had forgotten that women attach considerable importance to such trifles. So the butter for the twins’ meals appeared on the same ersatz tableware. Our heroines were somewhat disconcerted but, as well-bred women, naturally made no comment. 177 1. The story of this trip is told by A. Whigham Price, The Ladies of Castlebrae: A Story of NineteenthCentury Travel and Research (Gloucester, 1985), 107ff.; for later trips see also Agnes Smith Lewis, In the Shadow of Sinai: A Story of Travel and Research from 1895 to 1897 (Cambridge, 1898). 178   K I M H A I N E S - E I T Z E N Agnes, indeed, saw in such unusual arrangements an excellent opportunity to combine study with eating, to blend intellectual refreshment with the somewhat clumsy methods prescribed by the Lord for refuelling the human frame. Hence it soon became her custom to scrutinise the ‘butterdish’ with an unobtrusive scholarly eye, to see whether it offered anything of interest. As a rule it did not; but one morning the grubby sheet proved to be a fragment of a palimpsest, and at the edge of the ‘dish’, disappearing under the lump of butter, was a line or two of the underwriting—clearly visible—which she at once recognised as a verse of the Gospels. This happened to be in Syriac, Agnes’ newly-acquired language (and therefore one in which she happened to be especially interested at that moment). Tactful and casuallyworded enquiries, after the meal, led her to a certain basket in the glory-hole where they had been working. There, she found a complete Syriac palimpsest of three hundred and fifty-eight pages, the leaves of which were mostly glued together by dirt and damp—so firmly, indeed, that the least force used to separate them resulted in instant crumbling. . . . The problem was how to investigate it, so frail was the condition of the codex: even the most delicate and careful manipulation with the fingers resulted in immediate damage to the vellum. Suddenly Agnes had an inspiration. Of course!—her tiny tea-kettle, that indispensable item of luggage for any British traveller. The very thing! Maggie was dispatched to the tent for it; the little spirit lamp was lit, and the kettle put on to boil. As soon as it began to steam, they held the leaves in the vapour; and to their satisfaction, the pages separated easily. The British passion for tea had once more paid dividends. When the pages were dry enough to examine, Agnes scrutinised them carefully under her lens. After a few minutes, she straightened her back and reported excitedly that while the upper (or more recent) writing seemed to contain an account—very well-thumbed in places !—of the lives of certain rather frisky women saints, the underlying and more ancient script was evidently a copy of the four Gospels of a very early date indeed.2 The immediate interest of the palimpsest, of course, lay in the underwriting— the four Gospels dated to...

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