The Letter Collection of Paulinus of Nola

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Paulinus made no effort to copy, edit, and organize his much-admired letters, but, at some point, readers and admirers began to build collections of his letters. Unfortunately, the late antique steps that led to the creation of the medieval representatives of this process cannot be retrieved, but, by all indications, late antique and early medieval collectors had organized Paulinus’s letters according to recipient. The current standard edition of Paulinus’s letters, however, divide his works between those written in prose and those composed in verse. The labeling of the two standard volumes of Paulinus’s opera as epistulae and carmina is clearly problematic, and the very fact that Paulinus’s ideas and themes habitually disregard the boundary between verse and prose poses serious challenges to the conceptual division implied by any such taxonomy.