An Ancient Anthology of Quotations from Augustine's Homiletic Works

Abstract

The subject of the present article is an ascetic anthology that was compiled in the first half of the ninth century at the latest and consists of fragments extracted from saint Augustine’s Tractatus in euangelium Iohannis, his Enarrationes in psalmos, and the early medieval collection of mainly Augustinian sermons De uerbis Domini et Apostoli. In spite of the exegetical interest of its sources, the anthology’s fragments mainly have a moralizing focus, which explains why it was attributed the title Ex sermonibus sancti Augustini episcopi sententiae eximiae de confessione et poenitentia atque peccatorum indulgentia in one of the branches of its manuscript transmission. The present article offers (1) a discussion of the position of the anthology’s sources within the direct transmission of Augustine’ works ; (2) a list (with bibliography) of its manuscript witnesses (mainly of German and Swiss origin, although there are some isolated French and Spanish witnesses) ; (3) an analysis of their stemmatical relationships (based on a study of both the manuscripts’ general composition and their textual variants) ; and (4) a critical edition of the part of the anthology that was extracted from De uerbis Domini et Apostoli. The article also sheds light on the nature of the version of the Quinquaginta homiliae (a sermon collection of Arlesian origin that was mainly composed of Augustinian sermons) that was joined with the anthology in the archetype of the latter’s transmission.