Introductory Notice
to
The Clementine Homilies.
[By the Rev. Thomas Smith, D.D.]
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We have already given an
account of the Clementines in the Introductory Notice to the
Recognitions. All
that remains for us to do here, is to notice the principal editions of
the Homilies. The first edition was published by
Cotelerius in his collection of the Apostolic Fathers, from a
manuscript in the Royal Library at Paris, the only manuscript of the
work then known to exist. He derived assistance from an epitome
of the work which he found in the same library. The text of
Cotelerius was revised by Clericus in his edition of Cotelerius, but
more carefully by Schwegler, Stuttgart, 1847. The Paris
ms. breaks off in the middle of the fourteenth
chapter of the nineteenth book.
In 1853 (Göttingen) Dressel published a new
recension of the Homilies, having found a complete manuscript of
the twenty Homilies in the Ottobonian Library in Rome. In 1859
(Leipzig) he published an edition of two Epitomes of the
Homilies,—the one previously edited by Turnebus and Cotelerius
being given more fully, and the other appearing for the first
time. To these Epitomes were appended notes by Frederic Wieseler
on the Homilies. The last edition of the Clementines is by
Paul de Lagarde (Leipzig, 1865), which has no new sources, is
pretentious, but far from accurate.