Cordula Bandt: On the prologue material of the catenae on Psalm

Many, but by no means all, manuscripts of catenae on Psalms start with collections of introductive texts by several patristic authors. These texts discuss form and content, the chanting of appropriate psalms for certain mental constitutions, the alleged authorship of the psalms, their original performance, the reasons for their order and many other general questions regarding the Book of Psalms.In 1902 Georg Karo and Hans Lietzmann published their catalogue of the Greek catenae. The prologue texts were between the parts of the manuscripts which they analyzed in detail to classify them as one of their 27 types of catenae on Psalms. However, subsequent studies, especially the fundamental analyses of the psalm catenae by Gilles Dorival revealed, that the prologue collections must not be taken as indicator for the appraisal of a catena, because they follow their own rights and have to be studied independently from the main catena in the manuscript. Therefore Dorival deliberately excluded the prologue material from his study.My paper will analyze some representative examples from the prologue collections in two directions: On the one hand the interrelations between these collections shall be examined. On the other hand, it shall be explored to what extend prologue texts and catena texts in the same manuscript follow a common composition style regarding the use of sources as well as methodological principles.