There are around eighteen extant Latin letter collections between Cicero in the first century before Christ and Augustine and Paulinus of Nola in the early fifth century after Christ. Almost all of these eighteen letter collections were first printed in the years between 1467 and 1475, as follows:

Letter collection Place and date of first publication

Publication of letter collections began more than a decade after the publication of the Biblia Vulgata of 1454, but only a few years after the 1465 editio princeps of the De officiis of Cicero. Letter collections, it seems, were a popular choice for early publication in book form, with the vast majority of Editiones principes produced of course in Italy. The very first ancient letter collection to be printed was that of Jerome, perhaps around or even before 14671, followed by the Ad familiares of Cicero in 1467. The last of the eighteen collections to be printed were Ambrose in 1490 (perhaps surprisingly late for one of the three doctores of the church)2, Symmachus in 1503, Paulinus of Nola in 1515 ‒ and of course Fronto3, who would not be discovered in palimpsest until 1815 (with a later discovery in 1823)4.

In printing the first editions of letter collections, editors often faced complex situations in the manuscripts, and had to make some difficult decisions on what to print. This was particularly the case with late antique Latin letter collections, which generally lack book units in their manuscripts. In counterpoint to Greek letter collections of the Hellenistic and imperial eras, which also generally lack book units5, Latin letter collections of the pre-200 CE era are characterized by their employment of book units, which give predictable order to the letters. Book units are clearly visible in the collections of Cicero, Horace, Ovid6, Seneca, Pliny and Fronto – with a corresponding general (if not invariable) stability in transmission of their letters. The Latin letter collections of late antiquity show rather more variation as regards the use of book units to articulate collections. The collections of Cyprian, Ausonius, Jerome, Augustine, Seneca and Paul, and Paulinus of Nola lack book units largely or entirely7, and correspondingly show considerable diversity in the number and ordering of letters included in their manuscript collections. (Even in collections which feature book units – such as Ambrose and Symmachus ‒ manuscripts vary in the extent to which they give book units the prominence they must originally have had in the collections first assembled by Ambrose himself and by the posthumous editors of Symmachus8).

By way of illustration of the difficulties that editors faced when producing their editions, we begin with Cyprian ‒ for whom there is no standard ordering of letters or total of letters in the manuscripts, although certain recurrent patterns can be observed in the positioning of individual letters and in the creation and positioning of clusters of letters (e.g. on confessors at Carthage and Rome, re-baptism, reconciliation of the lapsed)9. The 1471 editio Romana of Cyprian was based on a manuscript that lacked some important letters and which intermingled the treatises of Cyprian with his letters, and it was not until fifteen years later that editors began to separate the letters of Cyprian from his treatises, in the 1486 Stuttgart edition10. As for Ausonius, his letter collections exist in three different forms in the manuscripts, with few overlaps between the three distinct collections11. The so-called Z corpus was published first, and it was gradually extended as better manuscripts were discovered. The so-called V corpus was published later, and then intermingled with the letters of the Z corpus12.

The manuscripts for the letter collections of both Jerome and Augustine resist easy summary, since not only are there many thousands of manuscripts of (most other ancient letter collections exist only in a few hundred manuscripts at most), but these manuscripts exhibit huge diversity in both number and order of letters. For example, shorter collections of Jerome’s letters – roughly those containing thirty letters or fewer – are often relatively varied in the letters they assemble and avoid large concentrations of single addressees or themes. There are numerous exceptions – above all some shorter ‘specialist’ collections which focus (e.g.) on letters to and from Augustine13, or to Marcella and other female correspondents14, or on the Origenist controversy15. Many longer collections are built around recognizable and repeated clusters of letters; even where exact membership and internal ordering of clusters varies between manuscripts, clear family resemblances remain between these clusters. The clusters are generally of two sorts: those built around addressees or groups of addressees, and those featuring more varied sequences which nevertheless show some stability across manuscripts. The most common addressee clusters are those featuring correspondence to or from Damasus, Augustine, Marcella and other female correspondents, and (more rarely) Theophilus of Alexandria; plus a mixed sequence involving Jerome’s friends (Heliodorus, Nepotianus, Paulinus, Amandus, Pammachius and Oceanus)16. Nevertheless, whatever ordering by correspondent or theme is dimly visible across Jerome’s manuscripts, the editors of the 1467 editio Romana of Jerome’s letters made quite different choices in terms of selection and ordering. This edition intermingled the treatises of Jerome with his letters within a three-part structure based on subject matter: 1) works that defend the Catholic faith; 2) works that deal with questions of holy scripture; and 3) works on morals and virtues. The separation of Jerome’s treatises from his letters would not become standard until the 1700s17. As for Augustine, suffice to say that the manuscript tradition of his letters is no less varied and complex than that of Jerome, while nevertheless exhibiting some elements of deliberate ordering and design, particularly in terms of grouping letters by shared addressee or shared theme18. This is in fact the arrangement adopted in the 1471 editio princeps, where the editor Mentelin prints around 200 letters out of a modern total of over 300 letters associated with Augustine19.

The manuscript tradition of Paulinus of Nola is somewhat less complex, not least because there are only six principal manuscripts that carry a substantial collection of the letters20. A ‘core collection’ of thirty-two prose letters plus a sermon and a poem can be discerned across all six of these manuscripts, alongside a further twenty prose letters found as appendages to the core collection in varying numbers and combinations across the manuscripts (including letters sent by Augustine). Up to twelve poems are similarly appended to the core collection in varying combinations; a number of these poems are epistolary in character (including those sent by Ausonius). The 1515 editio princeps of Paulinus of Nola reproduces the order of the letters as found in the core collection of the principal manuscripts, albeit with some efforts at consolidation21.

As for the two late antique collections to feature book units, many manuscripts of Ambrose indicate a lacuna between the end of Book 2 of the letters and the start of Book 4 of his ten-book collection22. Early modern editors responded by using some letters from Books 2 and 4 of the manuscripts to create a Book 3 that does not in fact exist in the manuscripts23. (Divergences from the ten-book tradition can also be found elsewhere in the manuscripts: two early mss. offer different book divisions, and two further early mss. dispense with book divisions altogether and re-order the letters24). The letter collection of Symmachus seems to have circulated in later antiquity and the early middle ages as just over 900 letters also arranged in ten books. Anthologies or florilegia of the letters begin to appear from the twelfth century, but the ordering in anthologizing mss. largely reproduces that found in non-anthologizing mss.25. The 1503 editio princeps of Symmachus was in fact based on a florilegium of the collection, and contained only a selection of letters as far as the sixth book26. A first complete edition of the letter collection of Symmachus was not published until 158027.

In responding to the sometimes chaotic or inconsistent presentation of letter collections found in manuscripts or in very early printed editions, the editors of later printed editions occasionally decided to produce versions of a collection that they found personally more satisfying. It is here that we begin to see a preference for fostering or increasing the autobiographical potential of a letter collection.

As already noted, the end of Book 2 and the whole of Book 3 is missing from the manuscripts of the letter collection of Ambrose, and some twelfth-century manuscripts actually re-order the letters of the collection. In this context of chaos and fluidity in the manuscript tradition, Cardinal Montalto – the future Pope Sixtus V– decided that he could re-arrange the letters of Ambrose in a more satisfying order, as part of the eight-volume editio Romana of the complete works of Ambrose (1579-1587). Most of the letters appear in the fifth volume of this series, although a significant number of letters are displaced to earlier volumes. Within this fifth volume, the letters are re-arranged into eight books of Montalto’s creation28. Montalto’s first book of letters shows clear divergences from Ambrose’s original opening book. The first book of the letters of Ambrose, as it appears in most manuscripts, consists of six letters. Five of these letters are devoted to problems of biblical exegesis, concentrating above all on passages from the Pentateuch. This opening book evidently seemed to Cardinal Montalto unworthy of one of the Doctors of the Church, and he created a new letter collection. The first book of Montalto’s new collection preserves only one letter from the first book of Ambrose’s own collection, namely letter number one to Iustus on the interpretation of chapter 30 of the book of Exodus. To create a more satisfying opening unit, Montalto imports: three letters written by Ambrose in the name of the council of Aquileia to the emperors Gratian, Valentinian and Theodosius (epp. ex. 4, 6, 5); one letter written by Ambrose in the name of the synod of Milan to the bishops of Macedonia (ep. 71); correspondence between pope Siricius and Ambrose on behalf of the bishops of northern Italy, on the excommunication of Jovinianus (ep. Siric., ep. ex. 15); and one letter written by Ambrose, on behalf of the synod of Capua, to Theophilus bishop of Alexandria (ep. 70)29.

There are very few autobiographical elements in the six letters of the first book of Ambrose’s letter collection as found in the manuscripts: the emphasis falls on biblical exegesis. Montalto’s new selection of letters for his new first book is clearly more obviously autobiographical in its focus. Here we see a series of letters where Ambrose takes a leading role in writing on behalf of his fellow bishops gathered at Aquileia, Milan and Capua. He addresses letters to emperors, popes and other bishops across Italy and the Mediterranean. The concentration of these letters in Montalto’s first book creates an image of Ambrose quite different from that found in Ambrose’s own first book in the manuscripts. Whereas Ambrose creates for himself the image of an exegete in the mould of Philo and Origen, Montalto creates the image of a powerful bishop who intervenes in specific historical events, including the excommunication of Arians, the appointment of popes and bishops, and the propagation of orthodox beliefs. The (auto-)biographical impulse behind Montalto’s rearrangement is clear.

Around two decades before Montalto produced his edition of Ambrose in Rome, de Tournes produced his edition of Ausonius in Lyon, in 1558. The manuscripts, as noted earlier, offer three distinct collections of the verse letters of Ausonius: the Z collection, the V collection, and a third collection that we will call the Ausonius and Paulinus or H collection30. The Z collection was discovered and published first, in the Venice editio princeps of 1472. The V collection was not published until the 1558 edition of de Tournes. De Tournes preserved the structure of the collection as it was found in Z31, but added in elements from both the V collection and the H collection. The Z collection seems to preserve an Epistolarum liber that can be attributed to Ausonius himself ‒ as Luca Mondin has argued32. In this Z collection, letters to Paulus clustered at the beginning (XXVII, 2, 4, 5 Green) and at the end of the collection (XXVII, 6, 7&8 Green), and letters to Paulinus are gathered in the middle of the collection (XXVII, 19, 20 Green). Ausonius was clearly aiming to create symmetry in his collection. Furthermore, the Z collection contains only letters written by Ausonius, and excludes any replies from others.

Into this collection, de Tournes inserted material from the V collection and from the Ausonius and Paulinus H collection33. De Tournes added into the middle of the collection the famous long verse letters exchanged between Ausonius and Paulinus written after the conversion of Paulinus (XXVII, 22, 24 Green). At the end of the collection de Tournes added the three prose letters exchanged between Ausonius and Symmachus (Symm. ep. 1, 31, 1, 32, 1, 25). There are several important changes here. First, the symmetry of the Z collection is now obliterated. Secondly, the collection now includes replies from others – that is, replies from both Paulinus and Symmachus. The result is a book which amplifies the autobiographical potential of the original collection. We can now see and understand the full range of Ausonius’ relationship with Paulinus, and we can now appreciate the relationship of Ausonius with Symmachus, the princeps of the Roman senate. This is no longer a carefully crafted literary unit centered around Ausonius’ literary life in Aquitania (evidently the original purpose of the Z collection), but a collection which lets us see the fuller religious and political relationships that Ausonius had to negotiate.

However, the most significant way in which early modern editors could highlight autobiographical elements within a letter collection was by re-arranging the letters in chronological order. The collections of Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine and Paulinus of Nola were all chronologically re-ordered between 1568 and roughly 1706. The only two late antique letter collections not chronologically re-ordered were those of Ausonius and Symmachus. The letters of Ausonius are not easily dated, and that is perhaps the reason why no attempt was ever made to re-order his verse letters. Why was Symmachus not re-ordered? One reason is perhaps that the collection of Symmachus preserved its original ordering by individual books, at least in some mss.34. By contrast there are no traces of book units in the manuscript traditions of Cyprian, Jerome, Augustine or Paulinus – and each of these would eventually be re-ordered.

However, the manuscripts of Ambrose preserve their book units, and these were re-ordered in 1690. In fact the first attempt to re-order a Latin letter collection had already been made as long ago as 1555. Furthermore, this collection – the ad familiares of Cicero – has well-marked book units clearly visible in the manuscripts35. In his short commentary published in 155536, Girolamo Ragazzoni describes his purpose in re-ordering the Ad familiares as follows:

The explicit purpose of re-ordering the letters by chronology is to realise the autobiographical potential of the letters. Ragazzoni aspires to a history of Cicero as well as to a history of the times, using the model of the Ad Atticum collection.

The first Christian letter collection to be chronologically re-ordered was that of Cyprian. The manuscripts of the letters of Cyprian reveal around ten major different orderings for the letters: there is no standard ordering37. Early printed editions of Cyprian’s letters, such as those of Rembolt 1512, Erasmus 1520, divided the letters of the textus receptus into four books38. In 1568, Pamelius pronounced himself highly dissatisfied with such chaos39:

Just as God brought order to primordial chaos, so Pamelius must bring order to the letters of Cyprian (with a pointed reference to the opening of Ovid’s Metamorphoses)40. And to Pamelius, the only possible way to bring order to chaos is to re-arrange the letters of Cyprian in chronological order. Once more, the model of Cicero’s letters to Atticus is cited as the legitimation of this chronological re-ordering:

In his edition of 1540 (and commentary of 1547), Paulus Manutius had indeed presented the letters of the Ad Atticum collection in chronological order – although this was in fact the sequence found already in the manuscripts, and Manutius’ own critical efforts were in truth confined to separating the conjoined letters that afflict the manuscript tradition for books 12 and 13 of the Ciceronian text. By contrast, Manutius’ 1563 edition of Cyprian had followed the editions of Rembolt and Erasmus in simply dividing up the letters found in the earliest editions into four books; he had also added a fifth book of previously unpublished letters41. In this context, the decision to attempt a chronological ordering does represent a radical intervention in the history of the text of Cyprian’s letters42. And although Pamelius does not make the point explicitly, the reference to the Ad Atticum suggests that the reason behind this re-arrangement of Cyprian has something to do with autobiography. As Ragazzoni made clear, it is only chronological ordering that allows us to see the history of a person.

After these early attempts to re-arrange the letter collections of Cicero and Cyprian in the 1500s, we must wait over one hundred years before the next authors are also re-ordered by chronology. The letters of Paulinus of Nola have a consistent order in the manuscripts, where they are largely arranged by groups of addressees (in fact the most common method of ordering ancient letters)43. However, in 1685, Le Brun des Marettes produced a chronologically re-ordered edition of the letters of Paulinus of Nola. Le Brun has relatively little to say on the motivations behind his re-ordering project: he merely advertises the fact of his re-arrangement, with the remark that:

Perhaps the tradition of re-ordering Cicero had made the benefits chronological re-arrangement seem too obvious for detailed comment44. For greater openness on the topic we must look to the first chronological editions of the letters of Ambrose, Jerome, and (especially) Augustine. These editions were all produced by the intellectual powerhouse of the French Catholic church, namely the Benedictines45.

In the early 1600s, the General Assembly of the Clergy of France lamented the fact that «most of the Greek and Latin Fathers […] were printed in London, in Frankfurt, and in Basel, heretical cities». As a direct result it was decided that new editions of the Church Fathers should be produced in Paris46. The Benedictines of St Maur, founded in 1621, played a leading role in the flourishing of patristic studies in France, particularly in the last three decades of the 1600s. Chronologically re-arranged editions of the letters of the three Doctors of the Church were produced in this period.

The letters of Ambrose were edited by the Benedictines as part of a complete edition of the works of the saint, published between 1686 and 169047. The editors, du Frische and le Nourry48, state in their preface that they encountered only disorder and confusion in the editions of their predecessors, and express their dissatisfaction, particularly with the editio Romana of Cardinal Montalto:

Here chronology as the default guiding principle for any attempt to order a letter collection is more assumed than argued for (although the altogether more laconic approach of the recent editor of the letters of Paulinus is avoided). But the importance of a chronological order is emphatically underlined. A more thorough investigation of the manuscript tradition (in which the editors claim to find even greater disorder), of course, would have revealed a canonical order modelled (ultimately) on the non-chronological letter collection of Pliny the Younger in ten books. But the Maurists are already set on their task of re-ordering the letters, where possible, strictly by date of composition:

In reality, given the difficulties of dating Ambrose’s (largely exegetical) letters, the letters had to be divided into two classes: letters that could be somewhat accurately dated (classis I) and those that could not (classis II). The first group began with Gratian’s ep. cupio valde of c. 379 C.E. (transmitted outside the collection in Ambrose’s De Spiritu Sancto) and ended with ep. ex. 14 to the church of Vercelli of 396 C.E.49. This ordering would itself remain canonical until the restoration of the original manuscript ordering in the late-twentieth century edition of Faller-Zelzer50.

It can be assumed that the editors wished to realise the historical and autobiographical potential of the letters of Ambrose. But for an explicit admission that this is the purpose of a re-arranging editor, we must turn to the Benedictine editors of the letters of Augustine, who participated in a complete edition of the work of Augustine around the same time as du Frische and le Nourry were editing Ambrose51. There is no canonical ordering of the letters of St Augustine found in the manuscripts. However, manuscripts do show a pronounced tendency to group letters by shared theme or shared addressee. Earlier printed editions tend to arrange their letters on the same principles. The Benedictine editors of St Augustine, however, draw a connection between the autobiographical Confessions and the letters:

Augustine may have portrayed himself «splendidly» (luculenter) in the Confessions, but «not so naturally as in the letters». They add that Augustine’s epistolary corpus gains further dignitas from this simple fact about his letter collection:

The letter collection covers both Augustine’s private history and the history of the church52. However, as the editors point out, the reader interested in tracing the life of Augustine or the history of the church will find himself unable to extract what he desires from the letters, owing to the «thoroughly disturbed order» of the letters as presented in previous editions:

The inevitable follows: it is clearly desirable that Augustine’s letters should be: «arranged in their correct order in accordance with a reckoning of time»:

A connection between autobiography and the re-arranging of the letters is clear: editors wish to realise the autobiographical potential of the letters. And to back their project up, they have an argument which no previous editor covered in this chapter has made so explicitly – or indeed so successfully. And that argument is that Augustine would have chosen this way of ordering the letters himself, had he lived to edit them:

The reference here is to a work of 427 C.E., in which Augustine reviewed his many published works by chronological order and in the light of their progressive conformity over time to Catholic orthodoxy. In a useful contextualisation provided by one critic, «In many of Augustine’s later writings, and most dramatically in the Retractationes, the sense of change and progress first seen in the Confessions becomes a dominant current flowing through the entire oeuvre»53. Augustine, with his distinctive understanding of personal change and development, virtually writes later editors a license to order his letters chronologically. There is no other epistolographer of whom something similar might be said so convincingly.

A Benedictine edition of Jerome – including the letters – began to appear a few years after the first Benedictine volumes of Ambrose and Augustine. Here a chronological rather than thematic arrangement of Jerome’s letters was initiated by Jean Martianay in the 1693-1706 five-volume Maurist edition of Jerome undertaken with Antoine Pouget (who died after the publication of the first volume). Volume four (1706) records Martianay’s assertion that he had been the first to publish the Jerome’s letters in chronological order54. Martianay’s edition of Jerome’s epistolary corpus, however, was soon judged to be unsatisfactory, and it was supplanted by Domenico Vallarsi’s Verona edition of 1734-1742 (revised and augmented some thirty years later in the Venice edition of 1766-1772)55. Vallarsi established the current numeration of the letters, and distributed them within five time periods: 1) 370-381 C.E.; 2) 382-385 C.E.; 3) 386-400 C.E. 4) 401-420 C.E.; 5) undatable items56.

It is evident from recent study of the manuscripts of Jerome that a standard ordering of the letters of Jerome can be found in around thirty-five manuscripts of the ninth to twelfth centuries57. In this standard ordering, the collection typically opens with the letters to pope Damasus to Augustine, and it typically ends with a sequence of largely female correspondents, particularly Marcella. As in the case of Augustine, this ordering by addressee is of no interest to the editor of the letters. In the preface to his edition, Vallarsi echoes at times almost word for word statements made by the Benedictine editors of Ambrose, albeit with subtle changes of emphasis. Thus, for example, previous editors of Jerome are taken to task for adopting a method of arrangement which takes account of subject matter but not time, whereas earlier editors of Ambrose had been criticized for ignoring both:

And, like the editors of Augustine, Vallarsi praises the letters of his subject for their wide embrace not only of personal matters, but also of scriptural exegesis and church history:

But in order to realise the autobiographical potential of the letters fully, the letters must be re-arranged into chronological order. However Vallarsi could have pushed his argument even further, with just a little more reflection. Jerome is known to have had interests in chronology himself as the translator and editor of a work of historical chronology-1. Indeed Jerome, like Augustine, also took care to list his own works according to chronology (but partly also according to genre) in a published work (De viris illustribus 135)-1. Despite this, Vallarsi produces no detailed argument that Jerome himself would surely have arranged his own letters in chronological order, had the opportunity been given him-1.

In sum, late antique letter collections may have autobiographical potential. Modern editors felt they could only realise that potential by re-arranging the letters in the order of the life. In this sense, ancient autobiography has been created by modern editors. But what is the broader context for all this editorial activity on the letters of the church fathers-1? Perhaps relevant here is a shift documented in French early eighteenth-century letter collections by Janet Altman. Here, collections of letters by contemporary individuals apparently begin to be published for the first time in carefully marked chronological order. Indeed the editors advertise the innovation prominently-1:

Altman interprets the innovation as a response by editors to a readership «whose expectations and interests have been profoundly altered by new developments in narrative forms between 1670 and 1735, particularly in the novel»-1. However, quite apart from the low literary prestige of the novel by comparison with poetry and drama, we may doubt on other grounds that the Maurists were adapting their editions of the letters of the Church Fathers to meet changes in taste amongst the novel-reading public. But clearly something important was afoot in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century France.

Altman 1986 = J. G. Altman, The Letter Book as a Literary Institution 1539-1789: Toward a Cultural History of Published Correspondences in France, «Yale French Studies» 71, 1986, pp. 17-62.

Cain 2009 = A. Cain, The Letters of Jerome: Asceticism, Biblical Exegesis, and the Construction of Christian Authority in Late Antiquity, Oxford 2009.

Callu 1972 = Symmaque, Lettres, tome I (livres I-II), texte établi, traduit et commenté par J. P. Callu, Paris, 1972.

Clough 1976 = C. H. Clough, The Cult of Antiquity: Letters and Letter Collections, in C. H. Clough (ed.), Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller, Manchester 1976, pp. 33-67.

Diercks 1999 = Sancti Cypriani Episcopi Epistularium, edidit G. F. Diercks, vol. 3.3, prolegomena, Turnhout 1999 (CCh SL 3D).

Dolveck 2017 = F. Dolveck, Z ou les tribulations italiennes d’un archétype Ausonien, Rome 2017.

Faller-Zelzer 1968-1982-1990 = Sancti Ambrosii Opera, pars X, Epistulae et acta, t. I-IV, recens. O. Faller - M. Zelzer, Vindobonae, 1968-1982-1990 (CSEL 82.1-3)

Ferrari 1976 = M. Ferrari, La tradizione milanese delle opere di sant’ Ambrogio. II: ‘recensiones’ milanesi tardo-antiche, carolingie, basso-medievali di opere di sant’ Ambrogio, in G. Lazzati (ed.), Ambrosius episcopus, Milan 1976, pp. 35-102.

Folliet 1994 = G. Folliet, L’édition princeps des lettres de saint Augustin parue à Strasbourg chez Mentelin vers 1471, «Sacris Erudiri» 34, 1994, pp. 33-58.

Gibson 2012 = R. K. Gibson, Letters into Autobiography: the Generic Mobility of the Ancient Letter Collection, in T. D. Papanghelis - S. J. Harrison - S. Frangoulidis (edd.), Generic Interfaces in Latin Literature, Berlin-Boston 2012, pp. 387-416.

Gibson 2018 = R. K. Gibson, The Epistulae Heroidum and the Epistolographical Tradition, in P. Fedeli and G. Rosati (edd.), Ovidio 2017. Prospettive per il terzo millennio, Teramo 2018, pp. 215-235.

Gibson-Morrison et al. (forthcoming) = R. K. Gibson - A. D. Morrison - A. Sarri - J. Abad del Vecchio, Ancient Letter Collections: a Critical Review 400 BCE - 400 CE, Oxford forthcoming.

Grafton 2009 = A. Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West, Cambridge MA 2009.

Hartel 1894 = Sancti Pontii Meropii Paulini Nolani Opera, pars I, Epistulae ex recensione G. de Hartel, Pragae-Vindobonae-Lipsiae 1894 (CSEL 29).

Hermanowicz 2008 = E. T. Hermanowicz, Possidius of Calama: a Study of the North African Episcopate in the Time of Augustine, Oxford 2008.

Hurel 1997 = D.-O. Hurel, The Benedictines of the Congregation of St.-Maur and the Church Fathers, in I. Backus (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: from the Carolingians to the Maurists, Leiden and Boston 1997, pp. 1009-1038.

Knowles 1963 = D. Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History, London 1963.

Mondin 1995 = Decimo Magno Ausonio, Epistole, introduzione, testo critico e commento a cura di L. Mondin, Venezia 1995.

Nauroy 2012 = G. Nauroy, Édition et organisation du recueil des lettres d’Ambroise de Milan: une architecture cachée ou altérée?, in A. Canellis (ed.), La correspondance d’Ambroise, Paris 2012, pp. 19-79, 99-127.

Pabel 2008 = H. M. Pabel, Herculean Labours: Erasmus and the Editing of St Jerome’s Letters in the Renaissance, Leiden 2008.

Sarri-Abad del Vecchio 2022 = A. Sarri - J. Abad del Vecchio (edd.), The Aldine Edition of the Epistolographi Graeci, «Bulletin of the John Rylands Library» 99.1, 2022 (special issue).

Seeck 1883 = Q. Aurelii Symmachi Quae supersunt edidit O. Seeck, MGH AA 6.1, Berlin 1883.

Trout 2017 = D. E. Trout, The Letter Collection of Paulinus of Nola, in C. Sogno - B. K. Storin - E. J. Watts (edd.), Late Antique Letter Collections: A Critical Introduction and Reference Guide, Berkeley 2017, pp. 254-268.

van den Hout 1988 = M. Cornelii Frontonis Epistulae, edidit M. P. J. van den Hout, Leipzig 1988.

Zelzer 1983 = M. Zelzer, Mittelalterliche ‘Editionen’ der Korrespondenz des Ambrosius als Schlüssel zur Überlieferung der Briefbücher, «Wiener Studien» 96, 1983, pp. 160-180.

Bibliographic metadata

Roy K. Gibson, Durham University, United Kingdom, roy.k.gibson@durham.ac.uk, 0000-0001-8737-7481

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Roy K. Gibson, Autobiographical Elements in Printed Editions of Late Antique Latin Letter Collections, © Author(s), CC BY-SA 4.0, DOI 10.36253/979-12-215-0676-1.04, in Filomena Giannotti, Daniele Di Rienzo (edited by), In aula ingenti memoriae meae. Forme di autobiografia nella letteratura tardolatina. Atti dell’International Workshop – Siena, 13 e 14 giugno 2024, pp. 17-18, 2025, published by Firenze University Press and USiena PRESS, ISBN 979-12-215-0676-1, DOI 10.36253/979-12-215-0676-1