The Lord’s Prayer, as transmitted by Matthew 6:9–13, has been perhaps the most widely repeated text from the New Testament. The commentary on this prayer by Hugh of Saint-Victor, generally followed in the manuscript tradition by his reflection on the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, is not one of his more widely known writings. Its goal is moral, namely to identify the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer as responding in different ways to the various vices that mark the human condition: pride, envy and anger as directed particularly against God, with four others (accedia or sloth, avarice, gluttony and luxuria or lust).

From a technical point of view, the edition is a model of its kind, certainly with regard to the analysis of the manuscripts in which the text is transmitted. The analysis of the manuscript tradition takes over 150 pages, while the two Latin texts being edited are actually quite small, some 40 pages for the »De oratione dominica« and 6 pages for the »De septem donis spiritus sancti«. The text itself is not complicated, in that it does not survive in multiple recensions. Francesco Siri’s analysis of some thirty-two manuscripts is professionally done. For reasons of space, he does not provide a full description of all the contents of each manuscript, but confines himself to noting the works immediately adjacent to the texts being edited. The descriptions of the manuscripts and of previous editions are followed by a meticulous analysis of the interrelationships of the entire manuscript tradition, divided into four major groups. He does not identify any single manuscript witness as providing the text to follow, but observes that Saint-Victor was clearly the sources of a lost original from which other copies were made. He suggests that the original text might not have been finished, which could account for the variation in terms of rubrics added to the text.

While there is rich detail on the manuscript tradition, there is little in this volume by way of introduction to the broader literary and intellectual context of Hugh’s reflection on the Lord’s Prayer. Francesco Siri notes that the work is rich in psychological analysis, but does comment on the influence of Cassian on the text as a whole. In the Index Fontium to the work, he identifies only two patristic passages, from Gregory the Great and Isidore, as having influence on the work. Editing Hugh is notoriously difficult because he does not identify by name the authors on whom he is drawing. In this respect the Index Fontium gives little clue to the rich tradition on which Hugh draws.

Francesco Siri is not able to offer any precise reflection on when Hugh might have composed this text. It contains no clear allusions to other, more theologically oriented works that might help situate it within the broader evolution of his career. Readers need to turn to an essay of Francesco Siri in a volume that he himself has edited, »Le Pater noster au XII^e siècle: lectures et usages« (Turnhout 2005), in which Gilbert Dahan offers a useful overview of the genre. The 12th century witnesses the flowering of a number of such commentaries. Peter Abelard famously provoked the censure of Bernard of Clairvaux for insisting that at the abbey of the Paraclete, the Lord’s Prayer be recited using the word supersubstantialem (the original Latin term used by Jerome in his translation of the Prayer) rather than cotidianum – the term, used by Luke 11:3, which entered standard liturgical use. The fact that Hugh makes no allusion to this debate suggests that his Commentary may have been written prior to this controversy, which provoked Abelard to deliver his own exposition on the Lord’s Prayer, edited by Charles Burnett¹. Francesco Siri (p. 42) mentions as a manuscript excluded from his analysis, in fact by Richard of Saint-Victor, beginning Inter omnia que humana fragilitas. In fact this latter text was printed among the works of both Hugh of Saint-Victor (Migne PL 175, col. 766D–774A) and Peter Abelard (Migne PL 178, col. 611A–618C). Comparing Hugh’s composition with that of Richard (which begins with much stronger criticism of contemporary religious practice) brings out the firmly ascetic angle taken by the first great master of Saint-Victor.

Within the vast range of Hugh of Saint-Victor’s output, this commentary and subsequent reflection on the gifts of the Holy Spirit are relatively minor works. Nonetheless, they do deserve attention for the way they subtly combine an ascetic tradition of thinking about the need to turn away from the vices with a more Augustinian reflection on the need for human’s to be open to the working of the Holy Spirit in the soul. Francesco Siri is to be congratulated for the meticulous effort he has put into this critical edition. It is up to readers to inform themselves further about the work’s wider context.