Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

een composed before c.700. 111 On this evidence, the ‘booklet’ can probably only have
been established as such after the seventh century, when this letter was in circulation.
In a different regard, however, the false attribution of the letter to Caesarius
makes the text more, not less, interesting. The earliest extant copy of the letter dates only
to the ninth century (Vatican, Bibl. Apost., ms. Reg. Lat. 140); sources are silent on when
this attribution occurred, whether it was a deliberately false attribution to an established
monastic authority, or an accidental inclusion in a body of texts to which it did not
belong, at some time between the seventh and ninth centuries. Clearly it was deemed to
belong to the Caesarian canon by the time that Defensor used it in the seventh century,
and remained so at least until the twelfth; going by its content alone, later medieval
readers saw nothing inappropriate about its inclusion in a body of work by the renowned
Caesarius. The bishop’s fame as an author of texts of guidance for those engaged in a
dedicated life continued beyond the early middle ages.
Returning to consider both manuscripts together, in general the Caesarian texts in
the Toulouse and Vatican manuscripts do not have the same variations from the other
codices in common, as one might expect if they had been copied from the same source. 112
It may be possible to speculate that their textual forebears had been copied from the same
booklet, and enough time had passed for each strand to have developed its own
variations. Such a pattern of dissemination may be represented as follows:
111 De Vogüé, Oeuvres pour les moniales, 287-8.
112 One example of where this does occur is in the text of the letter O Profundum, where both manuscripts
insert the word subditae into the phrase ‘ne forsitan [subditae] audientes tacitis cogitationibus dicant...’,
De Vogüé, Oeuvres pour les moniales, 428.
157