Reinhart Ceulemans: Psalter Catenae: Ongoing Research and Desiderata

The fifth and last volume of Gilles Dorival’s Les chaînes exégétiques sur les Psaumes was published recently (Leuven, 2018). This book completes a major study of the Greek catenae on the Psalter, and in that sense its publication provides an occasion to reflect on past, current and future research in this field. Significant progress has been made since G. Karo & H. Lietzmann’s classification (Göttingen, 1902), but much of what undoubtedly is the most complex corpus of catenae remains to be explored. Guided by G. Mercati, R. Devreesse, M. Richard and E. Mühlenberg, twentieth-century scholarship reached insights that charted the tradition (or at least identified its backbone) in a definite way. Their approach was dominated by a desire to retrieve in the Psalter catenae remains of patristic commentaries. In the last two decades, research has been continuing that line—and rightly so. In addition, the Psalter catenae are now being approached by patristic, Byzantine and biblical scholars in other ways and with different goals. Their work reflect the trends in the broader field: next to being used to retrieve remains of patristic commentaries, Psalter catenae are now studied as literary products in their own right, included in projects of digital editing, subjected to detailed paleographical and art-historical analyses etc. In my paper, I reflect on this evolution and on what can and should be expected from future research, while also discussing what is going on at present.