The Penitential Psalms or Psalms of Confession, so named in Cassiodorus's commentary of the 6th century AD, are the Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143 (6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129, and 142 in the Septuagint numbering).
The texts which have appeared cover a wide range of authors including on a random selection Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian, Origen of Alexandria, Aphrahat, Gregory of Nazianzus, Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Cassiodorus, John Philopon, Abelard, Rupert of Deutz.
This was also a period of transmission: the Roman patrician Boethius (c. 480–524) translated part of Aristotle's logical corpus, thus preserving it for the Latin West, and wrote the influential literary and philosophical treatise De consolatione Philosophiae; Cassiodorus (c. 485–585) founded an important library at the monastery of Vivarium near Squillace where many texts from Antiquity were to be preserved.
This work was a brief commentary on selected passages covering the whole Bible, as is shown in the fragments preserved by Oecumenius and in the Latin version of the commentary on the Catholic Epistles made at the instance of Cassiodorus.