Hildegund Müller
Associate Professor
Biography
Hildegund Müller is a specialist of late antique Latin literature, both poetry and prose, especially the Latin Church Fathers. She has published two volumes of a critical edition of Augustine’s Psalm Sermons (Enarrationes in Psalmos) for the CSEL series, as well as numerous studies on this and other late antique sermon collections. Her interest in late antique homilies covers widely different aspects, such as their relation to classical rhetoric, their use of Biblical and other sources, the way they are shaped by improvisation and orality, and their Nachleben in the Middle Ages.
Her other field of interest is the Latin Middle Ages, especially poetry and (early) exegesis. She wrote her dissertation on an exegetical collection from the late Carolingian era (the so-called ‘Luculentius’ homiliary) and published articles on poetry from the 11th and 12th centuries. Her current book project is a study of Augustine’s sermons, which brings together theological and philological approaches, such as close reading, late ancient rhetoric, orality, as well as innovative computer-based approaches. She is collaborating with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (David Chiang, Stephen Bothwell) on the computer-based analysis of late ancient prose rhythm and colometry as well as stylistic analysis (parallelism). Other current projects are concerned with Augustine’s worklist Retractationes and medieval and early modern Latin exegesis.
Frequently Teaches
Introduction to Christian Latin, A Survey of Medieval Latin, Christians in the Roman World, Augustine
Research Interests
Latin rhetoric, Augustine of Hippo, late Latin literature, late ancient and medieval preaching, medieval poetry, Digital Humanities
Representative Publications
Augustinus, Enarrationes in Psalmos 61–70, edidit Hildegund Müller, (CSEL XCIV/2), Berlin 2020
Augustinus, Enarrationes in Psalmos 51–60, edidit Hildegund Müller, (CSEL XCIV/1), Vienna 2004
Scripture in Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos. The Reception and Interpretation of the Bible in Christian North Africa, Volume 2: from the assemblies of the 390s C.E. to 650 C.E., ed. Anthony Dupont and Jonathan Yates, 115-139 (De Gruyter Handbooks to the Bible and Its Reception).
Bothwell, S., DeBenedetto, J., Crnkovich, T., Müller, H., & Chiang, D. (2023). Introducing Rhetorical Parallelism Detection: A New Task with Datasets, Metrics, and Baselines. Submitted to Association for Computational Linguistics; accepted (not invited). arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.00100.
Augustine’s Retractationes in the Context of his Letter Corpus: On the Genesis and Function of an Uncommon Genre. Revue d’études augustiniennes et patristiques 62 (2016), 95-120.
Education
MA in Classics and German, PhD in Classics and Venia legendi in Ancient and Medieval Latin Literature from the University of Vienna, Austria
