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Journal of Early Christian Studies 8.1 (2000) 118-119



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Book Review

Sancti Hilarii Pictaviensis Episcopi Tractatus super Psalmos: Instructio Psalmorum, In Psalmorum I-XVI


Sancti Hilarii Pictaviensis Episcopi Tractatus super Psalmos: Instructio Psalmorum, In Psalmorum I-XVI. Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 61. Introduction and critical edition by Jean Doignon. Turnholt: Brepols, 1997. Pp. cxv + 363. FB 7250.

This edition has turned out to be a sad yet fitting tribute to Jean Doignon. He died on 8 June 1997 before this first volume actually appeared. Hopefully the two subsequent volumes will continue the standards set here. The last complete edition of Hilary's Instructio and commentary on fifty-eight psalms was published in 1891 by A. Zingerle for CSEL (22) in 888 pages of Latin text. In 1988 M. Milhau provided an edition of Hilary's comment on Psalm 118 for SChr (344 and 347). With the current project, the complete critical text will become available in three volumes in the clear and spacious format of CCL.

This project is indeed a fitting conclusion to the productive professional career of Jean Doignon. He has published an impressive body of scholarship on Hilary of Poitiers ranging from critical editions to learned articles and comprehensive monographs. For contemporary scholarship on Hilary, he established the dominant paradigm. He recognized the significance of Hilary's exile to Phrygia by which to evaluate the cultural and theological resources of a Latin speaker from western Gaul suddenly thrust into the issues of Greek-speaking Christians. So Doignon has worked within the accepted chronology of Hilary's writings. In 1970 he published a thorough investigation of Hilary's use of Latin literary and theological culture for his early Commentary on Matthew and later provided a two volume critical edition for SChr (254 and 258). Doignon's studies demonstrated Hilary's indebtedness to Tertullian and Cyprian as well as to Cicero, Sallust and Vergil. He has set a challenge for subsequent investigators to explore Hilary's appropriation of the Greek theological culture of the "homoiousians" around Basil of Ancyra and his adaptations of these to his Latin context. He contributed to the introduction in the 1999 edition of Hilary's De Trinitate for SCh (443). With this current project, Doignon has turned to Hilary's extensive Tractatus super Psalmos composed in the final years of his life.

In his helpful introduction, Doignon has provided resources for future investigators. In addition to a brief discussion of the genre of the Tractatus, he has supplied internal cross-references to confirm the conventional dating. He has also provided some oblique references to Hilary's experiences with Imperial authorities. He provides considerable detail on the twenty-five manuscripts which he has employed. He provides dates, lists of contents and colophons. In this he has [End Page 118] surpassed the eleven manuscripts used by Zingerle. He has also questioned his predecessor's reliance on the St. Gall palimpsest. Instead Doignon bases his edition primarily on three manuscripts. Two of these are fifth-century uncial manuscripts used also by Zingerle: Verona (Biblioteca capitolare XIII [11] and Lyon (Bibliothèque municipale 452 [381] + Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale nouv. acq. lat. 1593). To these Doignon adds the testimony of a Carolingian manuscript: Vaticanus Regina lat. 95. This codex shares errors and "more difficult readings" with the two earlier ones. A colophon in this codex identifies its origins at the Abbey in Micy near Orléans in the early eighth century. He completes this section with a stemma of the manuscripts.

Doignon also provided the conventional summary of evidence for the influences of this text in the patristic and the medieval periods. He presents evidence for Augustine's Contra Julianum, Jerome's De Viris Illustribus 100, Cassiodorus' own Commentary on the Psalms, and a number of French medieval authors. This summary does not significantly extend work already done by others. Unfortunately, he overlooked evidence from Britain. Bede has three extensive quotes from Hilary's comment on Psalm 2 in his own Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles. The...

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