An Edition of the Long Version of Peter the Chanter's Verbum AbbreviatumPetri Cantoris Parisiensis. Verbum adbreviatum. Textus conflatus. By Monique Boutry. (Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaeualis, 196.) Pp. lxxiv+994. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004. €395. 2 503 04961 3

Extract

Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) was arguably the foremost theologian at the Paris of his day. Envisaging the house of theology as composed of lecturing, disputing and preaching, he himself was the first to compose lectiones on all the books of the Bible; his questiones were collected in a large Summa de sacramentis; and although few of his sermons have survived, he wrote a popular manual of moral theology for preachers, the Verbum abbreviatum (VA), that has survived in nearly a hundred manuscripts across western Europe. The VA was the first of the Chanter's works to be published, in 1639 by the Belgian monk Georges Galopin in a serviceable edition from three northern French manuscripts. It was given wide circulation when abbé Migne republished it in the Patrologia Latina in 1855. In 1905 Camille Miroux was the first to recognise that the VA had survived in two versions, a long one in six manuscripts and a short one in at least forty manuscripts that became the vulgate version and was that edited by Galopin. In a Handschrift Reise in 1959 I examined seventy-three of the eighty-five manuscripts known to me and published my findings, classifications and conclusions in Masters, princes and merchants. Galopin had also found a fragment of the long version which he published as an appendix to his own edition. Although it is futile to determine how many have consulted this fragment in Migne's reprint, to my knowledge I am the only one who has printed extracts from the complete long version.