Library › Latin: Early Christian Writings › Liber contra Amalarium
This treatise by Agobard, archbishop of Lyon, attacks the liturgical writings of Amalarius of Metz, who had administered the church of Lyon during Agobard’s exile. Agobard proceeds by quoting passages from Amalarius’s book on the offices, with chapter references, and then criticising them; the sample opens with Amalarius on the Greater Litany of 25 April and the Roman practice of not fasting on that day. Agobard objects to Amalarius’s allegorical interpretations of the liturgy as fanciful and in places doctrinally dangerous, and replies with passages from Scripture and the Fathers, such as Augustine on the one Christ, God and man.
The controversy between Agobard and Amalarius, with Florus of Lyon as Agobard’s ally, was one of the major disputes of the Carolingian church, and led to the condemnation of some of Amalarius’s views at the synod of Quierzy in 838. The treatise is valuable for the history of liturgical commentary, showing the resistance that Amalarius’s highly allegorical method met in his own time, even though his work went on to shape medieval liturgical interpretation.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 104, Parisiis 1851), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.