Michael Lapidge, Hilduin of Saint-Denis: The Passio S. Dionysii in Prose and Verse. Leiden: Brill, 2018, xiii, 897 pp.

Abstract

In 1987, Michael Lapidge made a momentous announcement in the pages of Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch. In a late eleventh-century manuscript from Winchester (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 535, fols. 1r-37r), he had discovered an anonymous ninth-century poem over 2000 lines long about the life and passion of Saint Dionysius. This poem, he argued, was a long-lost work of Abbot Hilduin (814-840) of the abbey of St. Denis in Paris, <?page nr="380"?>who had a vested interest in promoting the cult of his patron saint. Lapidge’s labor in bringing this poem to print has taken three decades, with good reason. He realized early on that the Passio S. Dionysii was a work of reécriture hagiographique derived from Hilduin’s better known prose Passio S. Dionysii, but this text had not been edited since 1574 and was consulted most frequently in Migne’s error-ridden nineteenth-century reprint in the Patrologia Latina. A new edition of the poem’s prose source was clearly in order, but that text was in turn dependent on a handful of other Latin texts about Dionysius, including older passiones, letters, hymns, and liturgical fragments. These ancillary texts too, Lapidge decided, deserved new editions.