Abstract
This is the final volume of six. Only in the fourth, which I reviewed in JTS, ns 52 (2001), pp. 930–1, was de Vogüé able to exploit his discovery that this commentary owes its present form to a twelfth-century Italian, Peter abbot of Venosa (d. 1156), previously monk of Cava, the monastery from which the unique manuscript comes. In the introduction to the present volume, de Vogüé reiterates his view that the commentary is not just a reworking of a lost work of Gregory the Great, but ‘une création pure et simple du xiie siècle’ (p. 26), though one that rests on profound knowledge of preserved works by Gregory. I continue to have doubts about this (far the most interesting question raised by the book). De Vogüé confesses that he is here entering on ‘un monde inconnu’, and the matter deserves deeper investigation. I remark, however, that almost all the words to which de Vogüé points in this volume as being non-Gregorian are attested before Gregory and so could have been used by him; an exception may be impaenitudo, which, according to CETEDOC, was hardly used otherwise except by Paschasius in the mid-ninth century. Besides vocabulary (and of course content and technique), the investigator should take note of the variations in observance of prose rhythm, to which Gregory was wedded, at least in the Moralia. Meanwhile, the view of Fr Clark (Revue Bénédictine 108 [1998], pp. 61–79) that Peter was working on the basis of a ‘substantial core of genuinely Gregorian material’ seems highly plausible.
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