This volume is the published result of a workshop held in Rome in 2015, convened in order to examine in detail the Collectio ex dictis XII Patrum (Collection from the Sayings of the Twelve Fathers), a vast florilegium compiled by Florus, deacon of Lyon, sometime around the middle of the ninth century. The Collectio amounts to an anthology of Pauline exegesis organised into twelve separate patristic compilations, each of which is ordered following the epistles of Paul. Comprising 1081 extracts taken from 200 individual texts, it is a veritable treasure trove for those studying the writings of the Church Fathers and their medieval reception. Equipped with the editio princeps, which was published between 2002 and 2007 (ed. Paul-Irénée Fransen et al, CCCM 193, 193A and193B), the eight contributions presented here, all in French, delve into the depths of the Collectio, probing the various compilations upon which it is built. In doing so, the essays all aim to shed light on the cultural texture of the world in which Florus operated and to highlight the importance of considering Florus's Collectio within the manuscript traditions of the various Church Fathers he read and utilised. It should be noted at the outset that this is a very detailed and technical volume, produced by a team of philologists whose expertise for the most part lies in the texts of the early Christian and late antique authors they study and, in several cases, have edited; as a result, it is heavy on the analysis of manuscript variants and stemmata codicum but light on context and background material, which historians unfamiliar with the topic might require.
After a brief foreword (8-11) and an even briefer preface by Louis Holtz (12-13), in which the aims and approaches of the volume are sketched, Pierre Chambert-Protat, the team's Florus expert, kicks things off (13-57). It is the longest contribution and serves as an extended introduction of sorts, examining the structure, organisation and coherence of the Collectio as a whole, together with the two twelfth-century manuscripts--Lyon, BM, 5804 and Vitry-Le-François, BM, 2--which alone transmit it. Chambert-Protat stresses the distinctiveness of the work in relation both to contemporary Carolingian exegesis of Paul and Florus's other, more renowned patristic florilegium, the Expositio in epistolas beati Pauli ex operibus s. Augustini. He also highlights that Fransen's edition presents a more uniform text than is found in the two manuscripts. This is shown with reference to the headings that introduce each of the twelve compilations: not only were there originally two different forms of headings, but one, for Cyril of Alexandria, was added to the Lyon manuscript only in the seventeenth century by the Jesuit scholar Pierre-François Chifflet. Most of the extracts from this particular compilation, moreover, came not from the writings of Cyril but from canonical and conciliar texts. The modern title Collectio ex dictis XII Patrum thus reflects Chifflet's imagination more than Florus's intentions.
Moving from the Collectio as a whole to its constituent parts, the next six contributions examine in turn eight of the twelve dossiers in the order that Florus arranged them. (Of the other four, two are dealt with by Chambert-Protat, and Pacian of Barcelona was already the subject of exhaustive study: only Avitus of Vienne awaits his own study.) Laetitia Ciccolini's contribution (59-84) focuses on Cyprian of Carthage. A surviving Cyprian manuscript from the fifth or sixth century (Paris, BNF lat. 10592) bears Florus's corrections, yet remarkably this was not the only exemplar that Florus had to hand. Working with the two texts Ciccolini recently edited (De habitu virginum and De laude martyrii), she tentatively situates this other lost exemplar within the wider manuscript tradition, a task made difficult by the complex transmission history of Cyprian. Nevertheless, the author underlines that Florus's willingness to use more than one source and even to intervene and correct what he read distinguishes him from his contemporaries; his working methods, beyond mere compilation, "portent la trace d'un véritable travail éditorial" (83).
Next, Marc Milhau (85-94) examines the material that Florus drew from Hilary of Poitiers. In this relatively short contribution, Milhau surveys the three works of Hilary used by Florus for the Collectio, noting how Florus skillfully extracted passages pertaining to Paul from all the resources at his disposal. For one of the three works, the Tractatus super Psalmos, a fifth-century fragment survives bearing Florus's annotations which correspond to the text found in the Collectio; the Collectio, therefore, can help reconstruct the text of the Tractatus not preserved by the fragment.
Ambrose of Milan, whose excerpted passages occupy a full volume of Fransen's edition (CCCM 193A), is the subject of Camille Gerzaguet's study (95-117). Florus worked with three Ambrosian texts: De fuga saeculi, De Iacob et vita beata and De bono mortis. Gerzaguet, who edited De fuga saeculi in 2015, here examines the other two, deriving from them notably different results. Analysis of Florus's excerpts from De bono mortis, which he curiously referred to as Liber de officiis IV, align his text with exemplars from St Gall and Reichenau; a descendant, furthermore, is identified, possibly linked to Florus's pupil Manno. By contrast, although Florus's exemplar of De Iacob produced no descendants, it appears to have been of impressive pedigree, textually very close to a Milanese edition of Ambrose's work produced after his death. Through the Collectio, therefore, we perhaps catch sight of "une relique tardo-antique, réduite à ce simple vestige" (117).
Changing course somewhat, Emanuela Colombi's essay (123-143) deals with the "Greek Fathers," Theophilus of Alexandria and Gregory of Nazianzus, to whom she adds Ephraim the Syrian to form "the eastern Fathers," '"un group perçu comme unitaire...comme une sorte de sous-dossier incorporé ensuite dans la plus vaste Collection de douze Pères" (125). In comparison to the previous two chapters, Colombi takes a less philological approach. She first considers the sources Florus selected and those he purposively omitted (most conspicuously, Origen's commentary on Romans), before considering the different types of relationship that connect the various extracts to their Pauline verses. Colombi points out that it remains uncertain why Florus put the Collectio together or how it might have been used, but suggests that further study of all Florus's patristic florilegia, including the unedited Pauline collections of Jerome and Gregory the Great, might bring a larger plan into focus.
In his analysis of Fulgentius of Ruspe, Jérémy Delmulle (145-175) effectively balances both textual criticism with wider reflection on the nature and purpose of the Collectio. Florus occupies an important place in the transmission of Fulgentius: the Contra Fabianum, for example, survives almost entirely through Florus's extracts. Delmulle, however, studies the extracts from the three other works of Fulgentius used, which he first seeks to locate within their respective manuscript traditions. Delmulle then zooms in on Florus's methods and aims. Florus had a plan, which went beyond "la simple récolte systématique de sources exégétiques propres à rendre compréhensibles les passages délicats du corpus Paulinum" (165). Rather, the "dossier fulgentien" was tied to, and perhaps even was prompted by, the controversy over predestination. Moreover, it needs to be read not simply as one compilation within the Collectio, but as a supplement to Florus's Augustinian Expositio, compiled not long after that great work in order to augment and update it. Delmulle's contribution is alone in trying to sketch a chronology.
Franz Dolveck's assessment (177-196) of Florus's extracts from Paulinus of Nola marks the last study of the Collectio itself. Dolveck, who edited Paulinus's poetry in 2015, here examines the transmission of his letters. Dolveck begins by looking at two ninth-century manuscripts annotated by Florus which offer striking insights into the deacon at work and the venerable contents of the Lyon library. Florus used one of these manuscripts (Vatican Reg. lat. 331, from which his extracts from Pacian of Barcelona also derived) as his source text for Letter 40; the other letters used were excerpted from a separate, non-extant collection. As in other contributions to this volume, Florus is shown to have been a keen reader and editor; it may very well be that two twelfth-century manuscripts from near Lyon, which textually line up with the extracts in the Collectio and contain Letter 40, stem from Florus's scriptorium.
While several of the preceding studies in the volume refer to Florus's Augustinian Expostio, the final contribution by Shari Boodts (197-211) puts this text front and centre, focusing specifically on the use of Augustine's sermons. Boodts complicates our understanding of Florus's working methods by drawing attention to the many instances in which passages marked-up for extraction did not end up in the Expositio. This implies an in-depth and careful review process, in which an initial selection of excerpts must have been checked against each other and those deemed unhelpful were discarded. Only then were the excerpts compiled together.
Boodts does not consider the extent to which Florus's impressively measured approach to compilation in the Augustinian Expositio might have overlapped or differed from his methods in the Collectio, though several other contributions do touch upon this important issue. This is one case in which an overall conclusion would have proved helpful, as a means to tie together some of the most significant threads running throughout the various essays presented here. That there are many such threads, of course, also speaks to the coherence of the volume. Beyond coherence, there is much else to recommend, especially to Latin philologists and specialists interested in Carolingian manuscript culture and the transmission and reception of the writings of the Church Fathers. It successfully addresses the big themes it set out to investigate, and it testifies to the great value of collaboration in studying a text as rich, complex and difficult as the Collectio. This volume is not the last word on the subject, nor does it intend to be. It is regularly noted that much work remains to be done in order to understand not only the histories of the texts used by Florus but also the functions and ends which his Collectio and his other patristic compilations might have served. Yet future work on the deacon of Lyon will need to take this collection of studies into account, something which will be greatly facilitated by the fact that it is readily and freely available online via OpenEdition Books (http://books.openedition.org/efr/3099).