medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Tom Izbicki asked if a modern edition or translation exists. A modern but not critical edition exists:
_Vita Jesu Christi e quatuor evangeliis et scriptoribus orthodoxis concinnata per Ludolphum de Saxonia ex ordine Carthusianorum_, editio novissima by A.-C. Bolard, L.-M. Rigollot, and J. Carnandet (Paris and Rome: Victor Palmé, 1865)
and one or two more 18th or 19thc editions, I believe, plus early modern printings.
But no critical edition and no translation. It is a massive work--approximately 730,000 words in Latin, by my calculations. It would come to about 1600 pages of text, excluding annotations, in a "normal" book format, e.g., that used by the Classics of Western Spirituality.
Fr. Milton Walsh in San Francisco and I have talked about translating Ludolf. It would probably require a team of three or four translators, which in turn, of course, makes editorial coordination and styling more difficult. Part of the problem is that the 1865 edition identified some of the patristic sources that Ludolf regularly cites by name, but did so inconsistently--sometimes citing to book and chapter of a specific work by the patristic author, sometimes merely citing the work, sometimes offering no reference at all. So even some of the identifications in the 1865 edition would need to be completed and many others need to be located from scratch. Fortunately, the nature of the work (a compendium) means that Ludolf did usually cite by name, rather than merely alluding silently. So the work of a critical edition would not involve tracking down half-allusions etc. This is more than made up for by the massiveness of the work itself and the large MSS dissemination. A critical edition would be an immense task. Whether one should translate in the absence of critical edition, of course, is yet another issue. One could, of course, translate excerpts, but the whole point of Ludolf's work is its comprehensiveness.
Anyone out there interested in joining a team for a project of this sort?
Dennis Martin
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