New Series: Papyri form the Green Collection

Corporate News - Publishing News
Date:  2012, August 01

Brill announces a new forthcoming book series -- The Green Scholars Initiative: Papyrus Series, Edited by Dirk Obbink and Jerry Pattengale – that includes rare, unpublished papyri texts from the private Green Collection. Jeffrey Fish is serving as the volume one editor.
Leiden (NL) / Boston (MA) -- 1 August 2012

Brill has signed an agreement to publish The Green Scholars Initiative: Papyrus Series, edited by Dirk Obbink and Jerry Pattengale – a new book series that will include rare, unpublished papyri texts from the private Green Collection. Brill is quite pleased with the collaboration and looks forward to working with the Green Scholars Initiative (GSI). The collection itself is an untapped repository of extremely significant papyri, and the GSI provides access to the leading specialists in the field working on the project.

Dirk Obbink (University of Oxford) directs the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Collection and publications, and  Jerry Pattengale (Indiana Wesleyan University and Baylor University) directs GSI, is a prolific author, international speaker, and oversees the publication of all Green Collection and GSI research projects.

The new series fits well among Brill’s strong portfolio of Classical Studies and Biblical and Religious Studies publications, as well as its extensive list of digitized primary source manuscript collections. Comprising of one to two new volumes per year, the new series will publish approximately 20 papyri with a thorough description, commentary with images, and web-based support for further resources. The first forthcoming volume in the series, planned to be released in early 2013, is dedicated to an early 3rd BCE papyrus containing an extensive, undocumented work by Aristotle on reason, and is currently being analyzed by a research group at Oxford University.

The Green Collection contains over 50,000 items, and now holds nearly 15,000 papyri acquired from private collections in Europe, and continues to grow. The collection is approximately 70% Greek, 15% Coptic and 15% late Egyptian. The collection is currently unpublished and contains items of extraordinary importance, including some of the earliest Greek literary texts known, dating to the early 3c BCE. A major building near Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. was purchased in July 2012 to house an international museum for these items.

For more information about this forthcoming new book series, contact Senior Acquisitions Editor Suzanne Mekking (mekking@brill.nl).