183ChAPtER SEVEntEEnPackaging Irenaeus
Adversus haereses and Its Editors
Paul ParvisT
he Trappist monastery of Orval nestles in the midst of trees and green fields in
southern Luxembourg, a mile or so from the French border. It is, of course, well
known for beers, cheeses—and editions of Irenaeus. There Dom Adelin Rousseau, the
editor of Irenaeus, died at the beginning of 2009, on 13 January, at the age of ninety-five.
His edition of Adversus haereses^1 is controversial, as well as magisterial, but it has
been the fundamental resource for all serious work on the text for a generation now,
and it shows no signs of relinquishing that role.
When we read Irenaeus—as when we read any ancient text—we are reading an
artifact, a construction, something that is the product of the ingenuity and the industry
and the bias of scribes and editors engaging with the text and with each other over a
period of centuries. What I want to do in this chapter is to look at the process of edito-
rial development that led up to Rousseau and to try to see how successive editors made
Irenaeus their own and how, as they did so, Irenaeus came—for them—to interact with
the problems and with the constraints of their own age.
No edition—indeed, no reading of a text—is ever value free, and surveying that
process may, I hope, help us to become more aware of what we are doing when we pick
up the text of Irenaeus. And it will, in any event, help us to appreciate the achievements
and the idiosyncrasies of those whose labors over a period of nearly four centuries have
brought the text of Irenaeus to us.
Erasmus
The editio princeps of Adversus haereses was prepared by Erasmus for the scholarly
printer Froben in Basel in August 1526. There had been talk of an edition of Irenaeus
for some time. As early as April 1522, Froben were hoping to get their hands on a
manuscript of Hae r. that Johannes Fabri was known to have had copied in Rome. Two
years later, in October 1524, Archduke Ferdinand, the Emperor’s younger brother, then
a precocious 21, was expecting one to appear.^2
But Erasmus, typically, cannot have spent very long preparing it. In May 1526, he
was still trying to get his hands on Fabri’s manuscript.^3 He duly succeeded, but Fabri