Expositio in psalmum David CXVIII
· Ambrose of Milan
· c. 386-390
· homily
Latin · domain: latin-patristic-fourth-century · researched 2026-11-14
no English translation located. No published English translation of this text was located in the catalogues and series checked. Where only a non-English rendering or a translation of a daughter version exists, it is recorded below and does not close the gap. Treat this as a gap candidate, not as proof that no translation exists; the evidence names every source checked.
Why this is in the register
HOLLIS Primo for 'Ambrose Psalm 118 commentary' (https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Ambrose%20Psalm%20118%20commentary&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 and 'Ambrose On Psalm 118' (https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Ambrose%20On%20Psalm%20118&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 return no English translation. The hits are the Latin critical edition (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999), the Italian 'Commento al Salmo CXVIII' (Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana / Rome: Città nuova, 1987, ed. Luigi Franco Pizzolato, 2 vols: record https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/990013652440203941), two Italian monographs on the work, and a Spanish rendering of Ambrose's twelve-psalm commentary that does not include Psalm 118. By contrast, Ambrose's Twelve Psalms (Enarrationes in XII psalmos) does have an English translation, 'Commentary of Saint Ambrose on twelve Psalms' (Dublin: Halcyon Press, 2000, Íde M. Ní Riain: https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Ambrose%20twelve%20psalms&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 which makes the absence of this much larger psalms commentary the conspicuous hole in the English Ambrose.
Twenty-two preached expositions, one for each stanza of the longest psalm, and by far the largest surviving work of Ambrose (about 116,000 words): a sustained ascetic and moral reading of the psalm that doubles as a handbook of the Christian life and is the chief witness to Ambrose as a preacher rather than a polemicist. It is the single biggest block of Ambrose still untranslated into English. Anyone working on Latin psalm exegesis, on Ambrosian ethics, or on the liturgy of Milan in the 380s has to read it in Latin or Italian.
Ambrose, Saint, Bishop of Milan, -397 · 1987 · ita, lat
Ambrose, Saint, Bishop of Milan, -397. "Commento al Salmo CXVIII." Milano : Biblioteca Ambrosiana ; Roma : Città Nuova, 1987. https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/990013652440203941
Ambrose, Saint, Bishop of Milan, -397 · 1999 · lat
Ambrose, Saint, Bishop of Milan, -397. "Expositio Psalmi CXVIII." Vindobonae : Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999. https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/990082335110203941