The Earliest Transmission of Augustine’s De ciuitate Dei, Book I

The article presents the first conclusions that can be drawn from the integral collation of Augustine's De ciuitate Dei book I, against all pre-10th century complete and partial manuscript witnesses (fragments excluded), in order to lay more scientific foundations for the establishment of the text of this masterpiece. First, a brief external and internal description of the manuscripts included in the corpus is provided. Second, the stemmatical configuration of the lower levels of the stemma is discussed. Lastly, the issues related with the main branches are examined, also with regard to the possible survival of authorial variants.