Not all sensational finds come out of the ground! Augustine scholars will be delighted at the news of 6 previously unknown sermons’ being discovered through a library “excavation†in Erfurt’s Bibliotheca Amploniana. Isabella Schiller and colleagues from the Austrian Academy of Sciences discovered these works while studying an 800-year-old manuscript in the summer of 2007.
Concealed in a medieval parchment manuscript amongst 70 other religious texts are ca. 26 sermons attributed to Augustine, 3 of them on brotherly love and alms-giving. These were known previously only by their titles cited in Possidius’ Indiculum. One sermon is on the martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas, and another on the recently martyred Cyprian, the latter of which condemns the copious drinking that took place on saints’ feast days. The final sermon deals with resurrection of the dead and biblical prophecies.
The 12th c. mss came from England(?) to Erfurt as part of the enormous collection of more than 630 books donated by the physician and theologue Amplonius Rating de Berka to the ‘Collegium Amplonianum’ which he founded in 1412.
For 24 amazing images of this absolutely pristine and gorgeous codex, see here.
The 6 new sermons will be published in Wiener Studien. Zeitschrift für Klassische Philologie und Patristik und lateinische Tradition
Sermones Erfurt 1, 5, and 6 in Bd. 121 (2008), pp. 227-284.
Sermones Erfurt 2, 3 and 4 in Bd. 122 (2009)
They can now be viewed on display in the Sondersammlung der UB Erfurt für Foto- und Filmaufnahmen. Several public lectures are
planned in the coming weeks.
(I learned of this via GREX)
http://www.fathersofthechurch.com/2008/ ... e-sermons/
I've only dabbled in Augstine, but I'd be interested in reading a few of these to feel like I'm putting my Latin to some sort of 'contemporary' use.