Legends of Our Lady Mary the perpetual virgin & her mother Hannâ: translated from the Ethiopic manuscripts collected by King Theodore at Makdalâ & now in the British museum

Ethiopic Legends of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the companion volume of translations of the Ethiopic versions of the Miracles of our Lady, are supplements to the reproductions of the Lady Meux MSS., Nos. 2-5, which Lady Meux printed for private circulation in 1899. Many scholars and others have wondered how these fine MSS. became detached from the great Makdala Collection which the British Army brought to England in 1868, and how they found their way into her possession. And as they have also asked why she rendered such a signal service to Ethiopic studies by printing the original texts, with English translations and costly coloured facsimiles of the pictures a work entailing great expense, and one which none before her had undertaken I print here a short account of the way in which she acquired them. In the spring of 1897 Lady Meux went to the establishment of Mr. Bernard Quaritch in Piccadilly to purchase a copy of Ludolf s Historia thiopica. Finding that she had been reading a translation of the Ethiopic Version of the History of Alexander the Great, he took the opportunity of showing her a group of fine Ethiopic MSS., which he had recently acquired from an officer who had served in the British Expedition to Abyssinia in 1867. She telegraphed to me asking me to go and examine the manuscripts and to report upon them to her without delay. I did so, and Mr. Quaritch put the manuscripts before me. The oldest of them was a small 4to volume containing a Life of Hanna, the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary ;it was illustrated with archaic Ethiopian pictures of Hanna and her husband Joachim, the Birth of the Virgin, etc., and was written in the XV th century.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology.