Exciting Latin lesson today!

I spent way too much time planning today's Latin lesson for my one student who's a dept. assistant on campus:

The library special collections exhibition space has a really really cool exhibit going on that includes examples of some the oldest Vetus Latina and Vulgate manuscripts.

So, I read the exhibition guide to figure out what verses were on there, assigned them to my student, and then after we read through a critical edition we're going to go look at the actual manuscripts.

I took 30min. the other day to go compare, and there's a lot of interesting stuff: misspellings, variants that are noted in the apparatus of our critical edition, use of enlarged letters to indicate Eusebian (sp.?) canon divisions (though they accidentally skipped one!), and even a homoiotelueton (where a verse gets omitted because they skipped ahead to the same word that was down the same page some).

There's also a really nice book with the beginning of the Psalms, and a 9th c. abbot's Bible from a famous monastery that's open to Jerome's preface to Proverbs and then the start of Proverbs.

If this lesson plan goes well, we might go do Psalms and Proverbs next week...

For sightreading, too, I'm going to make him look at "nihil obstat"-type ending to a 16th c. printed edition also on display.