Papers of Alphonse Mingana

Papers of Alphonse Mingana (1878-1937), scholar and curator of oriental manuscripts. Includes proofs of the index of his catalogue of his collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts; files of press cuttings; correspondence with manuscript dealers and with researchers; some correspondence concerning the Church of Malabar; notebooks which include draft articles, letters, and reports; photographs; books and articles.

The collection has been divided into three groups, the first two according to provenance, and a third section contains letters to Mingana. Each group has then been arranged by record type.

Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections also holds the Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern Manuscripts collected by Alphonse Mingana. A collection level description is available on the Online Archive Catalogue, reference: MINGANA. The annual reports of the curator of the Mingana collection is referenced: DA62. There are also some letters from Mingana in the papers of James Rendel Harris, reference DA21. Reference: DA67 includes photographs and news cuttings of Alphonse Mingana.

Access to all registered researchers

• Sections DA66/1 and DA66/2 have been catalogued. Section DA66/3 has not yet been listed in detail but a brief typed list of the letters is available in the deposit file for the collection.
• Catalogue for the majority of the papers is available at http://calmview.bham.ac.uk

Mingana was born near Mosul, Iraq, and was educated at the Seminaire St Jean, Mosul, where he trained for the priesthood, studying Turkish, Persian, Kurdish, Latin, French, Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew. He was ordained in 1902 and spent the next ten years studying and teaching at the Seminary. In 1913, following a dispute with the authorities, he left Mosul and travelled to England, settling in Birmingham, where he was befriended by the orientalist and biblical scholar James Rendel Harris. He spent the next two years living with Harris and at Woodbrooke College, where he met his wife, Emma Sophie Floor, a student from Norway. They married in 1915 and had two children. In the same year, Mingana moved to the John Rylands Library, Manchester to work as a curator of Oriental manuscripts; his catalogue of this collection was published in 1934. He made several journeys to the Middle East in the 1920s in search of manuscripts, financed by Edward Cadbury. In 1932, he returned to Birmingham to work as Curator of these manuscripts, the Mingana Collection. He died suddenly in 1937, just before the third volume of his catalogues was published.See 'Alphonse Mingana 1878-1937' by Samir Khalil Samir SJ (Selly Oak Colleges 1990).