Ennode de Pavie, Chantre Officiel de L'Eglise de Milan

About this book

Ennodius of Pavia (473/4-521) wrote more than hundred and fifty poems of varied length and inspiration, which date for the most part from his diaconate at Milan. During the last fifteen years, the attempts of translation and isolated studies have multiplied, but there is no synthesis that reports the specificity and the diversity of his poetic work, in particular, concerning the existence of an authentic vein of Christian inspiration. His opera count nevertheless about fifty ambrosian hymns and religious epigrams, whose importance has gone unnoticed until now. Unlike that which we can observe in the worldly poems, it is not the aristocrat who addresses himself to his peers, but the cleric who, hiding behind his superior clerics, acts as an official poet for the Church of Milan. The study of his epigrams enables us in this way to take in the political and religious ambitions, which fuelled the leaders of the Milanese Church; as for the twelve hymns composed for the local Church, they offer a concrete illustration of the liturgical life in Milan at the beginning of the VIth century. The volume not only enables the rehabilitation of Ennodius of Pavia as a man of the Church, but also, through the reflection on the attachment of Milan's clerics to the traditional aristocratic values, to the new image of the clergy in late Antiquity.