The Lost Patriarchs Project : Recovering the Greek Fathers in the medieval Latin tradition

This article calls attention to an important, yet neglected, subset of medieval Latin sources: the dozens upon dozens of works of late antique and early Byzantine Christian Greek authors translated into Latin between the second and the thirteenth centuries. It also introduces a new initiative to study these sources: The Lost Patriarchs Project. The goal of this article is threefold. First, it presents a sample of the deep, virtually untouched reservoir of medieval Latin texts that have Greek origins, including patristics, hagiography, and apocrypha, and marshals evidence for their use among medieval readers. Second, it considers some of the reasons why this corpus of medieval Latin literature has not been subject to critical inquiry. Third, it announces plans for a new instrument of reference tentatively entitled The Lost Patriarchs: A Survey of the Greek Fathers in the Medieval Latin Tradition. A reference tool of this kind would gather all that 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.