Magnus Felix Ennodius: a gentleman of the church S. A. H. Kennell

Garstad, Benjamin

Magnus Felix Ennodius: a gentleman of the church S. A. H. Kennell

Author

Garstad, Benjamin

Date

2002

Keywords

S. A. H. Kennell, Magnus Felix Ennodius: A Gentleman of the Church, Magnus Felix Ennodius

Abstract (summary)

Rather than a biography of Ennodius (474-521), who died the bishop of Ticinum (Pavia), Kennell presents us with an overview of the more remarkable pieces from the works he wrote as a deacon of Milan. Kennell defends her monograph on a writer whom she admits is less than first-rate by claiming that he was "fully engaged with his physical and emotional environment" and therefore gives us insight into the literature and culture of late antiquity (2), yet she rarely strays beyond the corpus of Ennodius to establish a context or situation. Although its precise implications are not often made explicit, one of the novel and insightful features of this study is the abandonment of Sirmond's classification and rearrangement of the works by genre in favour of the chronological order in the manuscripts (there is a concordance of the two systems at the end).

Publication Information

Garstad, Benjamin, review of Magnus Felix Ennodius: a gentleman of the church by S. A. H. Kennell. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Phoenix 56 (2002): 401-3.