Le opere dei padri della chiesa tra produzione e ricezione: la testimonianza di alcuni manoscritti tardoantichi di Agostino e Girolamo

In Late Antiquity the development of an autonomous Christian culture brought about important changes in the methods of composition and revision of texts. In the first instance, St Augustine’s Retractationes clearly show that many of his works (including the De Trinitate and the De Civitate Dei) were composed in desultory fashion over a long period. This implies textual instability, incompatible with the idea of a static archetype. Such instability is reflected in the physical characteristics of some of the oldest Patristic manuscripts, for example Petropol. Q.v.I.3 which contains one of the first collections of various works by Augustine. This collection was probably initiated, between the 4th and 5th century, by a scribe working in an African milieu connected with Augustine and then completed elsewhere in the 6th or 7th century. Another important observation concerns the Late Antique revision of texts: subscriptiones and certain marginal notes in sixth- and seventh-century Patristic manuscripts attest to the practice of textual correction. Study of these notes reveals the intention of stabilizing the transmission which had often been disrupted through complexity of the composition process.

The palaeographical and codicological study of the sixth-century manuscripts Paris. lat. 12214 and Paris. lat. 2235 (respectively the two most ancient manuscripts of St Augustine’s De civitate Dei and of the Tractatus in librum Psalmorum attributed to St Jerome) enables us to reconstruct the process of their transcription and their subsequent history. Paris. lat. 12214 was probably copied from two models (one containing the canon, the other the first part of the De civitate Dei), which may have orginated in the milieu of Eugippius. Paris. lat. 2235 is made up of three original manuscripts — probably three volumes of one single ‘edition’ — which were later bound together as a book. It also derives from several models, each containing a short section of the Tractatus. The emendationes made in both manuscripts shortly after their transcription reveal a strong attention to the material aspects of the books.