Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 1.djvu/652

This page needs to be proofread.

of Peter Daniel Huet (afterwards Bishop of Avranches), which appeared at Rouen in 1668. It included only the exegetical works, and was never completed. Herbert Thorndike, of Trinity College, Cambridge, had made large preparations about the same period as Huet for a collective edition, no part of which was printed. His manuscripts, among which is the unique copy of the important treatise On Prayer, are preserved in the Library of his College. The first editor of one of the longer treatises in Greek was David Hoeschel, who published the books Against Celsus in 1605.

We have no right to inflict a complete patristic bibliography on our readers. One more Greek father only shall be mentioned, namely, Eusebius of Caesarea. His Praeparatio Evangelica has been mentioned more than once in the body of this chapter. George of Trebizond's Latin version of it-faulty as it was-was printed again and again before 1500. The Greek text appeared at Paris in 1544 from the press of Robert Estienne. The same indefatigable worker brought out in the same year the History of Eusebius in Greek for the first time, along with the later Greek ecclesiastical historians. In Latin the history had long been current, and the sixteenth century had seen at least two fresh Latin versions, made by Wolfgang Musculus and by Christopherson. It was reserved for Valesius (Valois), in 1659, to produce the first really great illustrative edition of this priceless record of Christian origins.

The Latin Fathers demand a briefer treatment than those of the Greek Church. A good deal has been said already as to the reappearance of those authors who had been forgotten, and as to the labours of scholars upon the text of some who had always been studied. We may, therefore, in this place confine ourselves to a select few of the earlier Latin writers. The Apology of Tertullian was printed in 1483; but the first edition of any considerable part of his works was supervised by Beatus Rhenanus in 1521. Gagnaeus of Paris added some eleven tracts to those previously known, in 1545; and Sigismund Gelenius improved the text. By 1625 the whole of the writings we possess had appeared in print, and the editions were numerous. Those of Rigault, of which the first appeared in 1633, did most for the text of this earliest of the great Christian Latinists. Rigault had access to all the principal manuscripts, whether preserved in France, as those of Pithou and Dupuy, with the famous "Agobardian" Codex, in Germany, as that of Fulda, or in Italy, as that of Fulvio Orsini.

Cyprian, in a gravely interpolated text, was read throughout the medieval period, and five editions of his works appeared between 1471 and 1500. He was one of the host of writers who profited by the scholarship of Erasmus; the first Basel edition came out in 1520, and was often reprinted. Latino Latini undertook to edit the works, but was prevented from completing them; the results of his labours, taken