Establishing the authentic corpus of the Latin verse of Paul the Deacon; a philological, textual and statistical study

Abstract The thesis is a study, in eight chapters, of the poetic corpus attributed to the Lombard cleric Paul the Deacon (ca. 725-799) and its object is to determine the likelihood of his authorship of each of sixty-eight poems. Chapter 1 describes the state of literary culture in the period of Paul’s writings, summarises the two major biographical studies of him and some shorter, but important studies, and discusses the content of the two major editions of his poems and the extent to which their editors agree and disagree. Chapter 2 reviews nine studies of the works of Paul’s recent predecessors and contemporaries, commenting on the types of evidence employed to establish authorship and the extent to which such evidence has yielded reliable conclusions. Chapters 3-7 are an original contribution to the investigation of Paul’s authorship. Chapter 3 provides the first systematic study of the difficulties specific to studying the poetic corpus of Paul. Chapters 4 and 5 (the latter devoted entirely to the hymns) give a detailed account of the philological, textual and historical evidence for and against his authorship of the works studied, and an estimate of the likelihood of his authorship. Chapter 6 describes the relevant principles of statistical testing, while Chapter 7 describes its employment in this study, including the particular test devised for investigating metrical patterns in poems composed in dactylic metres. The test is illustrated, and its reliability is evaluated by ascertaining whether it has any propensity to throw up false positives or negatives, before applying it to poems of doubtful authorship. Finally, Chapter 8 summarises the conclusions, proposing the addition of four poems, including one which has never before been unequivocally attributed to him, to the provisional canon consisting of the twenty- eight which Dümmler and Neff agree are the work of Paul.