Sketch of the Life and Works of Saint Basil the Great

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Page 122

X.--Editions and Manuscripts.

Among the chief editions and mss. the following may be mentioned:

The Editio Princeps of the complete extant works of Basil in the original Greek is that which Froben published for Janus Cornarius at Bale in 1551. But Froben had already published in 1532, under the editorship of Erasmus, an edition containing the De Spiritu Sancto, the Hexaemeron, the Homilies on the Psalms, twenty-nine different Homilies and some Letters.

A Venetian edition, published by Fabius in 1535, comprised the Moralia, as well as the dubious book on Virginity, three books against Eunomius, and the tract against the Sabellians, Arians, and Anomoeans.

The Greek editions had been preceded by a Latin version at Rome, by Raphael Volaterranus in 1515, of which the autograph manuscript is in the British Museum, and by another at Paris in 1525, and by a third Latin edition issued at Cologne in 1531. These were followed by other editions printed at Paris, Antwerp, and Cologne. In 1618 Fronton du Duc, commonly known as Ducaeus, published, in conjunction with Frederic Morel, an edition in two folio volumes containing a Latin version as well as the Greek. The edition of the French Dominican Father Francis Combefis, was published shortly after his death in 1679. The most important step in the direction of accuracy and completeness was taken by Julian Garnier, a Benedictine Father of the Congregation of St. Maur. He revised and corrected the Greek text of earlier editions on the authority of a number of manuscripts in Paris, Italy, and England, and issued the first of his three folio volumes at Paris, at the press of John Baptist Coignard, in 1721. The third volume did not appear till 1730, five years after Garnier's death. In the meanwhile the editorial work had been taken up by Prudent Maran, another Benedictine, to whom are due a careful and voluminous biographical notice, many notes, and a chronological arrangement of the Letters. This was reissued in three 4DEG volumes in Paris in 1889, and is the basis of the edition published, with additions, by the Abbe Jacques Paul Migne, in the Patrologia Graeca, in 1857.

An important edition of a separate work is the revised text, with notes and introduction, of the De Spiritu Sancto, by the Rev. C. F. H. Johnston, published at the Clarendon Press in 1892.

German translations were published by Count Schweikhard at Ingolstadt in 1591 (Ceillier VI. viii. 8), and by J. von Wendel at Vienna in 1776-78. There have also been issued Basilius des Grossen auserlesenes Homilien, uebersetzt und mit Ammerkungen versehen von J. G. Krabinger, Landshut, 1839, and Auserlesene Schriften, uebersetzt von Groene, Kempten, 1875.

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