Marina Giani: Augustine as a source for early medieval glossography. Some remarks about the De civitate Dei extracts quoted in the Liberglossarum

The Liber Glossarum is an extensive encyclopedic glossary that was composed in the 7th-8th century, presumably by a team of compilers. It consists of approximately 55,000 entries, which are arranged in alphabetical order, and it is conceived as a gathering of human knowledge: its entries cover a broad diversity of fields, including artes liberales (especially grammatica), medicine, natural sciences etc. The sources include several Augustine’s works, among which the De civitate Dei is the most quoted. The paper aims to analyze the use of this treatise as a source for the glossary, by identifying the topics that arouse its compilers’ interest and describing the working method adopted for its exploitation. Moreover, it aims to investigate the relation between the Liber glossarum and the medieval tradition of De civitate Dei, by pinpointing the manuscripts which are (textually) the closest to the one(s) used by the Libe rglossarum compilers, in order to bring additional understanding on the origin of this glossary and to evaluate how reliable it is as an indirect witness, through which to restore the original text of Augustine.

Hildegund Müller: The early excerpt tradition of Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos

Augustine’s major exegetical works were especially prone to excerption, both because of their length and their complexity. The paper endeavors to explain and chart this process in its earliest stages, from the well-known excerpt collections of the 5th/6th century (Eugippius) to the Carolingian age (Florus, Walahfrid) and will give a survey and an evaluation of the earliest manuscripts, such as the excerpt commentary of Lyon, Bibl. Mun. 426 (and its largely unexplored relative, Einsiedeln 18). There are three questions to be asked: 1) Why, under which circumstances, and by whom were these excerpt commentaries produced?, 2) What is the textual value of these texts for the editor of Augustine?, 3) What is the work/authorial character of collections that are largey dependent on, but not identical with, Augustine’s commentary?

Nicolas De Maeyer: Augustinus egit, Beda compegit. The value of Beda Venerabilis’ Augustinian florilegium for the edition of Augustine’s writings.

One of the most influential exegetes at the forefront of the Carolingian Renaissance was Beda Venerabilis, whose Scriptural commentaries were heavily influenced by the writings of the Church Fathers and functioned as an important mediator between Patristic and Medieval exegesis. One of Bede’s most exemplary commentaries in this respect is the Collectio ex opusculis sancti Augustini in epistulas Pauli apostoli, a compilation of fragments from Augustine’s works rearranged to form a Pauline commentary.            Together with the florilegia of Eugippius and Florus, Bede’s Collectio is a key-text in the Late Antique/Early Medieval indirect transmission of Augustine’s writings and, as such, has been often relied on by editors of Augustine’s works. Due to the lack of a critical edition, however, these editors usually consulted only one or a few witnesses of the commentary, mainly Saint-Omer, Bibl. Mun. 91, the critical value of which is limited. Based on the edition of the Collectio I am preparing for the CCSL, I will evaluate, in this paper, the use of the commentary made by earlier editors of Augustine’s works and assess the general value of Bede’s florilegium for the edition of the Church Father’s oeuvre. Particular attention will be given to the Collectio’s paratextual material, namely its titles and book/chapter numbers. This analysis will further provide insight into which Augustinian works were available to Bede during the compilation of his exegetical commentaries and via which textual channels (direct transmission/other florilegia…) he knew these works.

Jonathan Zecher: Byzantine Monastic Anthologies and the Organization of Tradition

Byzantine monastic writers—as did all Byzantines—presented their beliefs and practices as traditional. While scholars have asserted the tensions of tradition and innovation in Byzantine monastic spirituality, the mechanisms by which novel ideas and schemas of knowledge could assume the appearance of antiquity and normativity are not well understood.This paper will present some of the mechanisms of innovation as they appear in Byzantine florilegia. It will be shown that these create what cultural memory theorists call a “canon” out of the “archive” of patristic and scriptural material—by authorial practices of selection, juxtaposition, modification, and attribution, the editor gives his resultant anthology the appearance of completeness and asserts continuity and homogeneity over the mass of materials available. Thus, anthologies witness to the motives and milieu of their editors as much as (likely much more than) they do to the past they purport to represent.Passages on confession in the Damascene’s Sacra,George the Monk’s Chronicon, Nicon of the Black Mountain’s Pandecta, and Mark the Monk’s Florilegium, will be examined to show how the motivation and organization of practices of confession emerge, via the processes of “canonization”, as a new organization of knowledge about death and postmortem judgment. We will close by suggesting that these same processes mark other, more famous anthologies, such as the Evergetinon and the Philokalia and, as such, require a new assessment of the role of anthologies in creating tradition in Byzantine theology.

Emiliano Fiori: Reshaping the Fathers, Learning Controversy. Syriac Patristic Florilegia as Laboratories of Religious Polemic in the Early Abbasid Age

The present paper aims to expound the first results of the research carried out within the framework of the ERC-StG project FLOS on Syriac patristic florilegia hosted at the University of Venice. It aims to present a short survey of the structure and aims of early Abbasid manuscripts containing vast anthologies of excerpts from Greek Church Fathers in Syriac translation. These anthologies or florilegia, produced by Miaphysite scholars, clustered the excerpts around topics that were the object of heated debate (especially but not exclusively Christology and the Trinity) among Christians and between Christians and Muslims from the 8th to the 10th centuries and beyond. In this rearrangement, the old authorities served as fresh handbooks for new religious polemic. The paper will discuss the excerption techniques, the thematic choices, and thereby the theoretical strategies of the compilers; it will also briefly introduce the differences between the manuscripts containing the florilegia.

Johannes Börjesson: Roman Florilegia on the Holy Spirit: Codex Parisinus Graecus 1115, Hadrianum, and the Lost Florilegium of Theodore I

This paper considers Roman florilegia on the Spirit that date from the very start of the conflict between East and West regarding the Spirit’s procession. Codex Parisinus graecus 1115 is a copy of a codex that was created in the papal chancery in 774/5. The patristic quotations of the extant florilegium on the Spirit within this codex are of a broad order; while many of them affirm a procession through the Son, some of them speak of a procession from the Son, while others do not mention the procession at all. Alexander Alexakis has shown that this is a pro-Latin collection, albeit from a very early date in the conflict. Alexakis has also shown that there are textual overlaps between this collection and Adrian I’s Hadrianum (793). In Hadrianum, Adrian argues explicitly for the procession through the Son, and does so from a very mixed range of quotations, even using citations that affirm the procession from the Son. This paper uses these multifaceted collections to throw light on Pope Theodore’s I now lost florilegium (c. 643), which is attested by Maximus the Confessor in Opusculum 10. The textual links between the three collections are considered, and their theological character investigated. It is demonstrated that these florilegia shared similar purposes, which reflect Rome’s position at a time before it accepted the interpolated creed. It is finally suggested that the strategy of considering these collections together offers a more secure route to reconstructing Theodore’s florilegium than approaches based purely on theological conjecture.