Befunde und Probleme lateinischer Tradition

Abstract

On the occasion of the jubilee of the GCS, also its Latin counterpart, the CSEL, organised by the Austrian Academy of Sciences since 1864, has been invited to give a short account on characteristics and problems of Latin Christian text tradition. So it is a great honour for both of us to present, out of our personal work, some examples of this tradition, being sometimes analogous, sometimes different from Greek traditions worked on by the editors of the GCS series. To begin with, just a few words on the Latin version of St Basil's Ascetic Rules, represented by the so-called 'Parvum Asceticum', the original (and shorter) version of the more expanded 'Regulae brevius et fusius tractatae', published in PG 31. While the larger version has been preserved in its original Greek text, its earlier form has survived only by its Syriac and Latin versions, the latter done by Rufinus of Aquileia in the year 396 on demand of an unknown abbot of a monastery somewhere on the coastline of Southern Italy (RBasRuf; first critical edition by K. Zelzer, CSEL 86, Vienna 1986). Therefore this text is of interest for scholars both working on St Basil's monastic writings, as witness of the lost Greek original, and those concerned with early western monastic tradition, for the RBasRuf was the earliest form of monastic regulations written in Latin, and later was recommended, together with the works of John Cassian, by St Benedict to his monks as textbook for spiritual studies. Unlike St Benedict's Rule, it has come down to us also by some four to five precarolingian manuscripts from Italy, Spain (?) and Corbie from the 6 t h century to around 700; ten more manuscripts of the 9 t h and 10 t h centuries preserve texts from Lerins, from the Frankish empire and from wisigothic Spain. Since all of those already follow their own textual traditions, sometimes also a look into the Greek text of PG 31 was helpful to find out the (supposed) original Latin variant. Those early textual differences and some fragments and quotations within historical documents from the early 6 t h century onwards (e.g. Vita Patrum Iurensium 174) show that the RBasRuf must already have spread widely in early western monastic times. Next to St Basil's Rule we were concerned with the textual tradition of St Benedict's Rule, edited by Rudolf Hanslik (CSEL 75, Vienna 2 1977) and by Adalbert de Vogue - Jean Neufville (SC 181-186, Paris 1971/72; the latter responsible for the section on textual tradition). Unlike the RBasRuf, St Benedict's Rule is preserved by far more manuscripts, but only by a single precarolingic one: by Oxford, Bodl. Hatton 48, of the 8 t h century, most probably written at Worcester. To tell a long story in a few words: Traube's traditional hypothesis of 'pure' (original, but kept close at Monte Cassino), 'interpolated' (worked over in late 6 t h century Rome and alone propagated in precarolingian times, represented by the Oxford codex) and 'contaminated' texts ('interpolated' text corrected to a copy of the 'pure' text only in carolingian times), basically taken over by the editors of both modern editions, had to be revised, by the actual evidence of the manuscript tradition, towards a more 'natural' view of the textual tradition: the so-called 'interpolated' text, still much nearer to the 'pure' one (and better preserved in Britain than in the Frankish regions), turned out to have been only an early branch of the precarolingian development, and the so-called 'contaminated' text, presenting a lot of variants not at all extant in the 'pure' nor the 'interpolated' texts (which Traube and his followers obviously were not willing to realise), clearly appeared as the result of a more or less continuous development of the text during Merowingian times on the Continent, which continued into the following centuries and spread out all over Europe with the Normans. A still different picture of both literary and textual problems is shown by the two Latin versions of the Apoc