© Copyrighted Material © Copyrighted Material www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com 14 Latin Hagiographical Literature Translated into Greek Xavier Lequeux Over the past few decades, scholars interested in medieval texts have paid an increasing degree of atention to the literature of translation. The feld of the Christian literature of the frst 12 centuries was explored in 1949 by the Benedictine A. Siegmund, who presented a list of Latin translations of Greek texts. 1 This precious catalogue, in which hagiographical works occupied the major part, was to open up new perspectives: the corpus of the texts thus constituted made it possible to evaluate knowledge of Greek in the medieval west, to analyse techniques of translation and to identify numerous specialised centres of translation. In general, these versions, which tended to be tackled contemporaneously with study of the indirect tradition of the original texts, 2 gradually lost their status as secondary literature: henceforward they constituted a completely separate feld of research. Curiously, translations from Latin to Greek have never aroused the same interest. In 1953, another Benedictine, Dom E. Dekkers, who was then preparing the Clavis Patrum Latinorum, noted several Greek versions of Latin texts; for hagiographical literature, he listed the Passion of the Scillitan martyrs (BHL 7527 → BHG 1645), the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas (BHL 6633 → BHG 1482), the Life of Ambrose of Milan by Paulin (BHL 37 → BHG 67), the Lives by Jerome, of Paul of Thebes (BHL 6959 → BHG 1466–70), of Malchus (BHL 5190 → BHG 1015–16) and of Hilarion (BHL 3879 → BHG 752–3), the Life of St Benedict (BHL 1102 → BHG 273), drawn from the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, translated into Greek in their 1 Siegmund, Die Überlieferung der griechischen christlichen Literatur in der lateinischen Kirche bis zum zwölften Jahrhundert. For a recent survey of Latin translations of Greek texts, see Chiesa, ‘Le traduzioni in latino di testi greci’. 2 It sometimes happens that a version makes it possible to obtain a state of text older than what is atested in the most ancient copies of the original text. The case of the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzos is exemplary: several of these texts were translated into Latin by Rufn in the late years of the fourth c., while the most ancient surviving collection of Greek orations dates back no further than the ninth c.