Consonant with their austere approach to fragments, Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen have excluded biographies, verse histories and chronicles from their collection, while acknowledging that the generic boundaries between these genres is not always clear cut. The first, the introduction, outlines the methodology adopted in the volume, before turning to the questions of genre and circulation. By contrast, Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen assign Secundus one fragment, not from Paul the Deacon, but from a scolion in a manuscript containing a collection of canon law (242-3).įHistLA falls into two parts. Earlier adepts of Quellenforschung, such as Reinhard Jacobi in the second half of the 19 th century, identified around 50 chapters of Paul the Deacon’s work as being wholly or partially derivative of Secundus’ lost work. Take, for example, the editors’ approach to the late 6 th century historian, Secundus of Trent, long believed to be a major source behind books two to four of Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards. The results of this approach can be stark. This approach excludes hypothetical works, partially preserved works, or projected works (2), and the authors make a particular point of distinguishing their aims from those of the traditional Quellenforscher. Their approach is cautious and minimalist, including as fragments only those texts which are ‘explicitly attributed to a particular author or work’ (6). Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen have set out, in the spirit of Felix Jacoby, to ‘give the reader a clear sense of what we know and what we do not know’ (6) about the lost historians in question. The task before Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen is considerable, not least because of the debates around many of the authors covered by this volume. The Fragmentary Latin Histories of Late Antiquity (FHistLA) is the first concerted attempt to gather the testimonia and fragments of the Latin historians from the fourth to seventh centuries AD, ostensibly picking up where the collections of Hermann Peter and the recent Fragments of the Roman Historians left off. Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen have produced a book which realises the potential of such a venture. Although this may be the less spectacular route, ventures in fragment collecting have the potential to reveal much about the working methods of a historian, the transmission of texts, and the circulation of knowledge. The other path is confined to the recovery of ‘fragments’, that is to say the gathering of explicit references to lost authors and their works. One path to fulfilling this quest involves the development of hypothetical relationships between sources known (or speculative).
The quest for the lost sources behind our surviving historical narratives is an endeavour not for the ingenuous, or the easily excited.
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