Reconstruction of an Autograph: Towards a new critical Edition of the Regula pastoralis of Gregory the Great

Dr. Martin Fiedler, Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, München

Manuscript 504 from the Bibliothèque municipale de Troyes (T) is a stroke of luck for philologists: it contains the text of one of Gregory the Great's most influential works, his Regula pastoralis. For decades, specialists have been convinced that it is either the autograph or at least the original text into which Gregory himself entered corrections.

But the textual history is more complicated: the last critical edition dates from the beginning of the 1990s (ed. Judic/Rommel, Sources chrétiennes 381/382, 1992). However, the editors do not take into account the different textual layers. However, on the basis of preliminary work by Italian scholars and my own collations of about 20 manuscripts, two versions of the Regula can be produced for the first time (T1 and T2), the second of which represents the final version. However, from the beginning, the approximately 800 surviving manuscripts mostly offer a text contaminated from both versions. Only one manuscript (P) (Arch. Cap. S. Pietro D. 164, Vatican Library) offers an almost intact text of T2. In addition, the collation of T has revealed that Gregory's text deviates in some places from the SCh edition.

The new critical edition, which is expected to be published by Herder in 2023 with an introduction, translation and concise commentary, faces various editorial problems: for T contains gaps, Gregory's corrections are not always coherent or stringent. A complete standardisation of Gregor's Latin (as in the SCh) fails to recognise the recognisable decadence of the state of the language - there are numerous vulgarisms in the text which have not always been corrected and not throughout.

The production of a more sound text of the Regula resembles a philological thriller with many open questions.