Two previously unknown homilies of St. Augustine discovered in Polish monastery

Pelplin, Poland, June 22, 2026

Photo: uni-wuerzburg.de Photo: uni-wuerzburg.de     

Two previously unknown homilies by St. Augustine of Hippo have been identified in a 12th-century Latin manuscript held at a monastery in Pelplin, Poland, a Latin scholar at the University of Würzburg has announced.

The manuscript was brought to the attention of Professor Christian Tornau after an employee of the Bad Doberan Monastery Association in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania contacted him in 2024 to decipher it. The manuscript, which originally belonged to Bad Doberan Abbey, contains six sermons in total; two of them proved to be previously unrecorded works by the Doctor of the Church, reports the Union of Orthodox Journalists, with reference to the University of Würzburg.

Professor Tornau is now working with the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL) edition series on a critical edition of the two texts.

Photo: uni-wuerzburg.de Photo: uni-wuerzburg.de Both homilies treat the Old Testament account of the Witch of Endor from the 1 Kings (1 Samuel), in which King Saul, on the eve of battle against the Philistines, asks a necromancer to conjure the spirit of the deceased Prophet Samuel. The passage raises a theological question about why an omnipotent God would permit such an act.

To verify authenticity, Tornau collaborated with Weidmann and convened a summer school in Vienna in autumn 2025, attended by twenty other Latin scholars, all of whom concurred that the homilies are genuine. Style, humor, and content were all cited as consistent with St. Augustine’s known corpus.

The transmission history of the manuscript presented additional difficulties. A 12th-century copy is later than what would be typical for St. Augustine manuscripts, and Tornau considers it likely that the Pelplin manuscript derives from an earlier exemplar at Amelungsborn Abbey in Lower Saxony—a hypothesis supported by an old monastery catalogue listing texts with matching headings and sequence, though unconfirmed because the entire Amelungsborn library was destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War.

The critical edition is expected to be published by CSEL at the end of 2026.

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6/22/2026

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