2011 Réunion de l’AELAC

The programme for the 2011 Réunion de l'AELAC, which takes place June 30-July 2 in Dole, has been posted on-line (available HERE).These are the titles of the papers announced thus far:

Anne-Marie Polo de Beaulieu, “Usages et fonctions des apocryphes dans les recueils d'exempla et la prédication aux XIII^e-XIV^e siècles.”

Brent Landau, “Revelation of the Magi.”  

Yves Tissot, “Évaluation critique de l'édition des Actes de Thomas de M. Bonnet."

Kristian Heal, “The Syriac History of Joseph.”  

Tony Burke, “New Developments in Constructing a Critical Edition of the Syriac Infancy Gospel of Thomas.”

Witold Witakowski, “The ‘Vienna Protology’ and recently discovered paintings in a church in northern Ethiopia based on this Ethiopic apocryphal text.”

L’édition de textes à traditions multiples : approches théoriques et pratiques avec les interventions de:

Els Rose, “L’édition des Virtutes apostolorum.”

Zbigniew Izydorczyk, “Excer[-or-]cizing uncertainty: reflections on editing the Evangelium Nicodemi.”

Bart Janssens, “Les séries latines de Brepols et les outils électroniques.”

Caroline Mace, “La série grecque du CC et le logiciel Classical Text Editor.”

And here is the abstract for my paper:

“New Developments in Constructing a Critical Edition of the Syriac Infancy Gospel of Thomas”

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (IGT) is one of the most ancient texts of the Christian Apocrypha, dating perhaps to the early second century.  Though scholarship on IGT has been sparse for decades, the past ten years has seen a surge in interest in this text. Several major studies have appeared including my recently released critical edition of the IGT’s Greek manuscript tradition (De infantia Iesu Euangelium Thomae Graece. Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum 17. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). Despite the importance of the Greek tradition, it has long been recognized that some of the early versions of IGT—Syriac, Latin, Georgian, and Ethiopic—represent an earlier form of the text. The most important of these versions is the Syriac, of which there are manuscripts dating to the fifth century—six centuries older than the earliest Greek manuscript. This paper describes all of the known Syriac manuscripts of IGT and arranges them into three recensions: Sa, which includes the two previously-published but fragmentary fifth-century manuscripts along with two later but complete witnesses; Sw, the west Syrian (or “Jacobite”) form of the text extant in twelve unpublished manuscripts; and Se, the east Syrian (or “Nestorian”) version found in three manuscripts of the Life of the Virgin Mary, which was published from one of these witnesses by E. A. Wallis Budge in 1899. A critical edition of the Syriac IGT is long overdue and will be of great benefit to the study of this important text.