Six new sermons by St. Augustine discovered

The University of Erfurt has announced in a press release (March 26, 2008) that six previously unknown sermons of St. Augustine's have been discovered recently in a special collection of its university's research library (Bibliotheca Amploniana) by three researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. The sermons reportedly appear in a handwritten manuscript dating back more than 800 years.

The researchers -- Isabella Schiller, Dorothea Weber and Clemens Weidman -- identified four completely new sermons of St. Augustine, and two that were previously only available in part, all written in medieval handwriting. The handwrittten parchment manuscript is identified as of a type originating in the second half of the 12th century, probably in England, and the work contains a total of more than 70 further sermons of different theologians of late antiquity and the middle ages.

The externally completely inconspicuous volume probably made its way by the 15th century into the collection of the bibliophile physician and theologian, Amplonius Rating of Rheinberg, who donated his extensive collection of over 600 handwritten volumes to the Collegium Amplonianum established by him in Erfurt in 1412. Read more here ...

[Excerpts from the press release are in my own translation.]