Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

works. As noted previously in Chapter 2, the very first of these is the use of a portion of
the letter by Caesarius himself, in his Regula monachorum. At the end of the rule for
monks, the final exhortative passage is a copy of the second paragraph of Vereor, with
the final sentence of the first paragraph to serve as an introduction. 119 It is, moreover, a
copy rather than an adaptation: nowhere else in his rule for monks does Caesarius employ
the direct address to his ‘venerabiles filii’; this is a direct substitution for the ‘venerabiles
filiae’ of Vereor. Of course, the fact that only one other change needed to be made
(sollicitae – solliciti) also reminds us that a significant proportion of the extract, perhaps
a third, is made up of Scriptural citation that evidently had no need of adjustment.
Beyond Caesarius’ lifetime, the circulation of the masculine Vereor can be
detected at some distance from Arles. Towards the end of the seventh century, Defensor,
a monk of Ligugé, made use of the letters Vereor and Coegisti me, in addition to some
sermons of Caesarius, in his Liber scintillarum. 120 Ligugé is only about five miles outside
Poitiers; Defensor lived near to the poitevin centre of Caesarian monasticism at Holy
Cross. This text brings together selections from the works of seventeen patristic authors
(in addition to the Bible) to illuminate Defensor’s themes of moral instruction and ascetic
teaching. The preface to the text describes the process by which he selected his ‘sparks’:
‘I attentively read the pages one by one, and, finding a shining sentence, as one would
with a discovered pearl or gem, I collected it with eagerness’. 121 Some of his texts are
wrongly attributed: Caesarius’ sermon XXXIII, for instance, is credited to Augustine. 122
Conversely, Defensor also attributes sermons to Caesarius which actually originated from
Eusebius Gallicanus and Faustus of Riez. 123 Evidence for Defensor himself exists only in
119 De Vogüé, Oeuvres pour les moniales, 287; the text of the rule is in A. de Vogüé and J. Courreau (eds.)
Césaire d’Arles. Oeuvres monastiques. II, Oeuvres pour les moines SC 398 (Paris, 1994), 204-227.
120 H.-M. Rochais Defensor de Ligugé. Livre d’Étincelles SC 77, 86 (Paris, 1961-2). See also D. Ganz,
‘Knowledge of Ephraim’s Writings in the Merovingian and Carolingian Age’ Hugoye 2:1 (1999), publ.
online at http://syrcom.cua.edu/Hugoye/Vol2No1/HV2N1Ganz.html; H.-M. Rochais, ‘Contribution à
l’histoire des florilèges ascétiques du haut moyen age latin’ Revue Bénédictine 63 (1953) 246-291.
121 Praef: ‘paginas quasque scrutans, sententiam repperiens fulgentem, sicuti inuentam quis margaritam
aut gemmam, ita auidius collegi. See Rochais, ‘Contribution à l’histoire des florilèges ascétiques’, 259-61,
for discussion of the prefaces in different manuscripts.
122 This applies to five sermons: Defensor uses Augustine’s sermons CXLI, CXLII, CCV, CCLXV and
CCLXVII, which are in fact Caesarius’ sermons 198, 199, 223, 13 and 33. Rochais, ‘Contribution à
l’histoire des florilèges ascétiques’, 284.
123 Rochais, ‘Contribution à l’histoire des florilèges ascétiques’, 285.
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