Jacob Lollar
Supported by Friends of Glasgow University Library
Jacob Lollar is a historian of late antique and medieval West Asian and Mediterranean religions. His PhD (Florida State University, 2018) focused on the production and interpretation of a native Syriac apocryphal text from the early fifth century. He has published multiple books on Syriac apocrypha, including the History of John (Gorgias Press 2020), the Doctrine of Addai (Cascade 2023), and the Acts of Thekla (Mohr Siebeck 2026). He has been awarded multiple international research grants. In 2017-18 he held a Chateaubriand Fellowship in the Humanities (Paris, France); in 2022–24 he was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow (Universität Regensburg); and he currently holds a British Academy International Fellowship (Durham University, 2024–27).
His current research focuses on the material heritage of Syriac Christians, looking at the large repository of manuscripts housed at the British Library. As the primary component of his British Academy project, he is developing a new approach to understanding the function of text and images within their manuscript embodiment. Rather than traditional textual analysis, he engages in New/Material Philology which prioritises the medium (the manuscript) as the primary locus of interpretation, understanding texts and images within the material embodiment through which they survive.
“The University of Glasgow Library has two early modern Syriac manuscripts in the Hunter manuscript collection that have never been studied. They contain rare texts and collections within the Syriac traditions and may be direct copies of other known Syriac manuscripts. Additionally, they contain many Latin glosses and marginalia that offer a rare opportunity to study the interface between Latin and Syriac––two languages that only rarely come into contact.
Using the approaches of New Philology, I will study both the textual and material contexts of these two artefacts. They need to be integrated into the transmission histories of the texts embodied in them. They also have potential to shed valuable light on the engagement with Syriac language and literature in early modern Europe, prior to the acquisition of Syriac manuscripts by European explorers and libraries.”
