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75 Roger E. Reynolds 6   The Influence of the Eastern Patristic Fathers on the Canonical Collections of South Italy in the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries In the spring of 1967, while I was working at the Vatican Library on my doctoral thesis as a Harvard Sheldon Traveling Fellow, I received a message from Robert Somerville, then a graduate student preparing his doctoral thesis at Yale. Professor Stephan Kuttner had asked him to contact me, and so we first met at the convent of the Piccole Suore della Sacra Famiglia , across from the Vatican Museum, where my family and I were staying . Thereafter Bob, as I came to know him, and I worked together at the Vatican Library and then in that summer at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where we spent long lunch hours talking shop in the park across from the library. All of this was the beginning of a close friendship, both academic and personal, that has flourished and endured over the years. The enormous debt of academic help and information I owe Bob is only partially reflected in the multiple acknowledgments to him in my articles and books. Beyond this, he has always been there for assistance and encouragement in the problems and joys of my life. One of our most recent meetings was to have been at the XIII International Congress of Medieval Canon Law in Esztergom in 2008, where he was the chairman of the session in which I was to deliver a paper. Fate would have it, however, that I spent those days in a hospital in Toronto and that because of the time constraints of that session Bob was not able to read the paper I had prepared and sent him. Since that paper was not part of the ‘Proceedings’ of the Congress, which are traditionally published, I offer it here in honor of the chairman of that session, my dear friend and colleague, Bob Somerville. Research for this article has been partially supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the program Monumenta Liturgica Beneventana. By way of introduction I should explain why a paper on the eastern patristic fathers should come from one who is not a specialist in eastern patristic studies. As is well known, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, which is my base, was founded by the renowned Étienne Gilson and by the fathers of the Congregation of St. Basil. Over the years the majority of professors at the Institute were Basilian priests, and they continued to be in the vast majority when I arrived in 1976. Naturally when I came I asked them an oft-put question, ‘How are the Basilian fathers connected with the great eastern father, Basil of Caesarea?’ The simple and surprising answer, they told me, is that after the French Revolution , when the congregation was founded in Anonay, France, the local parish church was named after that eastern father and the priests of the congregation simply adopted his name. More than a century after their founding, as the 1600th anniversary of the great eastern father’s death approached, the Congregation of St. Basil wanted to celebrate it by sponsoring a major international conference on St. Basil in Toronto. That is, they wanted to solidify in belated fashion their connection with St. Basil, perhaps in much the same way that the compilers of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals cloaked their work under the name of Isidore of Seville. Hence, to organize the conference, the Basilians in Toronto took on at the Institute a young scholar specializing in the works of St. Basil, Paul Fedwick. He did a magnificent job of inviting major international specialists on Basil from the world over and of planning a multivolume work with the proceedings of the conference.1 But what would be the role of the Basilian professors themselves at the Institute in this conference —beyond paying for it? They must have anguished in private over this a great deal. So a plan was hatched to, as they have often said, ‘ask Reynolds to help us out’ .2 Hence, as the youngest and most vulnerable member of the Institute, I was targeted to give a paper. My first answer was a firm negative. I was not a Basil specialist, my Greek had long ago lapsed, and I 76  Roger E. Reynolds 1. See P. J. Fedwick, ed., Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic: A Sixteen-Hundredth Anniversary Symposium (Toronto 1981). 2. The...

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