Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

evealing. It suggests that this collection of texts for dedicated women by Caesarius of
Arles had circulated as a booklet prior to the composition of the Vatican manuscript in
the ninth century, when monks in the Fleury scriptorium copied it into a manuscript of
texts, aimed largely at men, which were concerned with the ideology and practice of
living an ascetic life. Meanwhile, the Caesarian booklet continued circulating into the
twelfth century, when one copy of it was bound into a larger manuscript, perhaps at the
Augustinian convent in Toulouse. The fact that the ‘Toulouse’ booklet is written in a
twelfth-century hand implies the existence of further, older copies of the booklet from
which it had been copied. The copy of it in the Vatican manuscript was not made from a
single copy of the booklet that now forms part of the Toulouse manuscript. The booklet’s
circulation was therefore wider than it now appears.
While it may therefore be possible to establish the existence of the Caesarian
material in this manuscript as a separate booklet, is it possible to narrow its putative date
of construction? Here, the presence of the letter known as Coegisti me is useful. Morin,
editing the works of Caesarius in the 1930s, accepted the authorship of the bishop of
Arles and included it in his edition. However, in 1975 Raymond Étaix published an
article which demonstrated conclusively that the letter could not have been written by
Caesarius. 108 Coegisti me bears strong similarities to Pelagius’ letter to Demetrias of
c.413, Jerome’s to Eustochium, and the Moralia in Job of Gregory the Great, as Étaix
sets out clearly. 109 While it would not be inconceivable to posit that Caesarius had used
extracts of the two patristic letters, and Gregory the Great had in turn taken original
Caesarian material to use in his Moralia, it is unlikely in the extreme that Gregory would
have been able to do so without also using some of the phraseology of the Jerome or
Pelagius letters, of which there is no sign. 110 The letter Coegisti me must therefore post-
date the composition of the Moralia in Job, which places it after 579 x 585. It was also
cited in Defensor of Ligugé’s Liber scintillarum, suggesting that the letter must have
108 R. Étaix, ‘Trois notes sur saint Césaire d’Arles’, in Corona Gratiarum: Miscellanea patristica, historica
et liturgica Eligio Dekkers O.S.B. XII lustra complenti oblata I (Bruges, 1975) 211-227.
109 Ibid., 212-7.
110 Ibid., 217-8.
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