4. Manuscript Findings of Margaret Dunlop Gibson & Agnes Smith Lewis

Unlike most of the other manuscripts we’ve studied, a large part of the Sinai collection has stayed in Sinai. Because of this, manuscripts must be accessed by visiting the monastery itself or by referring to photographs of the manuscripts.

The sisters made checklists of the Syriac and Arabic mss. Take a look at

and to get a sense of how they went about this work. The additional Syriac mss. found at Sinai later were catalogued in The situation for the Arabic cataloguing is more complicated. See

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Example: MS Sinai, Syriac 30

The sisters used chemical reagents on the now famous Gospels palimpsest Sinai, Syriac 30 to try to make the undertext visible. Now it is through photographs that these mss are accessible.

• Sisters’ description and photo: https://archive.org/stream/catalogueofsyria00sainrich#page/n69/mode/2up
• Library of Congress (3r): https://www.loc.gov/resource/amedmonastery.00279386462-ms/?sp=5. For a description of the expedition to photograph these mss, see
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  Clark, Kenneth W. n.d. “The Microfilming Projects at Mount Sinai and Jerusalem.” Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/collections/manuscripts-in-st-catherines-monastery-mount-sinai/articles-and-essays/microfilming-projects-at-mount-sinai-and-jerusalem/.
• Sinai Palimpsests project (requires free registration):
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  St. Catherine’s Monastery, UCLA Library, and EMEL (Early Manuscripts Electronic Library). n.d. “Sinai Palimpsests Project.” https://sinai.library.ucla.edu/viewer/ark:%2F21198%2Fz12n5hwt.

Discussion Questions

• How did the sisters view/acquire manuscripts?
• What was their working process?
• What was their relationship to the monks?
• What was their relationship to other scholars, such as J. Rendel Harris, F.C. Burkitt, and Bensly?
  • See
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    Jefferson, Rebecca J. W. 2009. “Sisters of Semitics: A Fresh Appreciation of the Scholarship of Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson.” Medieval Feminist Forum 45 (1): 23–49. https://www.academia.edu/7042740/Sisters_of_Semitics_A_Fresh_Appreciation_of_the_Scholarship_of_Agnes_Smith_Lewis_and_Margaret_Dunlop_Gibson.
    , p.9.
• Michelson made the case that William Wright was far more interested in certain types of content (e.g., Bible) than in others (e.g., hagiography). Judging from the case of the palimpsest, to what extent was this also true of the sisters?
• How were the sisters’ aims and practices different from other manuscript hunters?
  • manuscript as artefact/treasure vs. manuscript as intellectual object
  • independently wealthy, not representatives of foreign power
  • patience to work on texts rather than simply take them

Works Cited and Further Reading