Critical Notes on Pseudo-Sisbert’s Exhortatio Poenitendi

Abstract

This paper discusses textual problems in an anonymous Late Latin poem entitled Exhortatio poenitendi. In his classic edition (Berlin 1914), Karl Strecker used nine witnesses. In my critical edition from 2021, I studied, collated, and classified twenty manuscripts of this poem and established a new stemma codicum; a manuscript not known to me at the time has been used in this paper. In this article I propose new conjectures absent from my edition, reject other proposals made by previous editors, and discuss lines in which either the stemma cannot be used to guide the editor in the choice of readings, the diffusion of variants is irregular, or I have made a choice different from that of previous editors. Many of the disputed passages can now be clarified in the light of two other works attributed to the same anonymous author (the Lamentum poenitentiae and the Oratio pro correptione uitae), which were published together with the Exhortatio poenitendi for the first time in my 2021 edition.