the goal of the lost patriarchs project

The goal of The Lost Patriarchs Project is the production of a collaborative, multi-volume instrument of reference called The Lost Patriarchs: A Survey of the Greek Fathers in the Medieval Latin Tradition.  The aim of this work is to further the study of the transmission and reception of Greek patristics in medieval Europe.  The book will explain by way of an introduction how the conceits of academic publishing have led to the neglect of the history of the transmission of patristic Greek Christian texts into Latin, primarily due to our emphasis on the importance of “original” texts in the Latin tradition at the expense of translations into Latin from other ancient languages.  It will then present a catalogue of the deep, largely untouched, reservoir of medieval Latin texts that have Greek Christian origins, both those known directly from surviving manuscript copies and those known indirectly from medieval library catalogues.  As the word “survey” suggests, this will not be a typical academic monograph, but rather a research tool modelled on Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Cambridge, 1983), that is, an alphabetically arranged handbook that presents a series of concise accounts of the manuscript tradition and transmission of Greek Christian literature in the medieval Latin tradition. A reference tool of this kind would gather all this is known about these texts in current scholarship, allowing future researchers to begin the work of creating critical editions of them and incorporating them into our understanding of medieval thought.