This week on the 17th, we celebrate the feastday of St. Sabinus of Piacenza (Placentia in Roman times). He was a saintly bishop, as was his predecessor, St. Victor. He participated in church councils and fought Arianism. He served for 45 years, and legend credits him with dying at the age of 110! The medieval Basilica of San Savino bears his name, and features cool stuff like a mosaic contrasting chess and dice as symbols of order and chaos. But he is best known today as a friend, colleague, and correspondent of St. Ambrose.
I like these letters. I like them a lot. So I am reading excerpts from them this week in honor of the good saint’s feast, and calling them Letters from a Friendship.
LetterXLV: All about Paradise. Don’t miss the bit about Eden’s trees possessing reason!
12:55.
Mosaic from San Savino’s presbytery showing Christ holding both the sun and moon in his hands. Page showing the whole of the surviving mosaic around it, including the chess scene.
Several enlargeable thumbnails of mosaics of the zodiac and of the nave floor as a sea. Separate pictures of the zodiac mosaics.
Pillar capitals in the crypt of San Savino; more pillar capitals in the nave.
Dear Maria Lectrix,
Your audiobooks are a worthy endeavor. You also credit the public domain books which is very well done of you too.
I notice that although you do credit the public domain text in your audio recording but fail to mention the website that went to a great deal of trouble to provide the material for your use.
Please consider crediting the individual or groups who’s websites made the material you like available to you. Considerable expense both in money, technical skills and time is involved in providing them, and also feeling that they were worth saving.
It is wonderful that you too share the tastes of the people who have saved and continue to save these books long before digitization became so common.
Sincerely,
Susan
Roger Pearse has been doing wonderful work in finding and buying old books and having some translated for years and his efforts deserve recognition.
Oh dear, Madame Maureen,
I just re-read that, and wasn’t quite clear. Sorry!!
You do credit the written sources by linking only, but the website itself isn’t credited in the audio version. The page sources, with the title could be written out in the blog.
Roger Pearse at tertullian.org is amazing and very unassuming. Few people know that he has travelled on his vacations and on weekend dashes to old monasteries and gotten permission to photograph their old and rare manuscripts. All so he could share them with us all. Many of his texts he pays others to translate into English, too, that have never been translated before. Some he translates himself.
Just thought you might like to know more about the man behind those books we all appreciate so much.
The rest of us fans have to do his bragging for him, since he won’t, so thought you could mention it in the audio as well.
(It is not his day job, either. Imagine what he could do full time!)
Frederick Furnivall (1825-1910), exactly described all people like Roger (and you, too) when he said:
“… scholarship could be pursued by quite ordinary people in a spirit of good-humoured enthusiasm.”
I hope that sounded nicer, because that is my intent. Your audio books help all those who can’t read the pages and are a wonderful contribution.
Very sincerely,
Susan