Il Martyrologium Hieronymianum. Storia critica della critica di un testo

Listed at the beginning of the history of studies as «There is perhaps no more horrible book in all of antiquity!», the Martyrology of Jerome (MH) was a text that has known a rich and intense critical, philological and exegetical history. ‘The MH said it!’ is what, in peremptory terms, is frequently read in studies to sanction the antiquity of a cult or to close some hagiographic discussion. Such an affirmation is the evident sign of ‘faith’ in a text, often well-placed, even if the very complex facies of its textual tradition have sometimes offered the side to choices, between variants and rewritings, directed to ‘make’ the text what most important, rather than what objectively and not arguably reports. The present paper examines the history of these studies in a rapid examination, at the end of which it can be concluded that the MH still possesses considerable potential for research: from the composite structure, different according to traditions, to the individual information contained (to be related to other similar texts, such as calendars and works of chronology and computing), each element of this text contains a possible information that is waiting to be valued, but following a constitution of the text that takes into account the complexity of the text and the most recent methodological contributions and textual criteria of philology.