Osservazioni sulla paternità della «Vita» e del «Liber de virtutibus sancti Hilarii» attribuiti a Venanzio Fortunato

Venantius Fortunatus, known and appreciated for his poetic work, is also the author of some hagiographies in prose that still lie in the obsolete critical edition of Bruno Krusch (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1885). Among these texts, the Life of Hilarius, Bishop of Poitiers, is the only one that includes two distinct parts, a biography (Vita) and a book on the post-mortem miracles of the Saint (Liber de Virtutibus). In the past it was common thinking that only the Liber was an authentic work of the poet, while the Vita had been written by another Fortunatus – a fourth-century hagiographer active in Gaul. The attribution of both works to Venantius Fortunatus by Krusch – mostly based on stylistic criteria – and the authority of the MGH have definitively closed the debate on the paternity of the works, but new discoveries on the manuscript tradition and some observations on the prologue of the Vita, such as the structure, the content and the style of the two texts, encourage – at least for the Vita – to reopen and reconsider the issue.