Framing ambrose in the resources of the past: The late antique and early medieval sources for a carolingian portrait of ambrose

In 1964 Angelo Paredi, the prefect of the library of St Ambrose in Milan, published for the first time a long and unusual hagiographic account dedicated to the eminent doctor ecclesiae Ambrose (373–97). From then on, this text would be known under the name De vita et meritis sancti Ambrosii (BHL 377d in the Bollandist catalogue). So far, only one copy of the text has been discovered in a miscellaneous codex preserved at St Gallen (Stiftsbibliothek, 569). It contains saints’ lives as well as fragments from heterogeneous texts such as the Apocolocyntosis by Seneca and the Apocalypsis of Pseudo-Methodius. The first codicological unit of the manuscript (pp. 3–97) is a libellus dated to the late ninth century: it consists of the entire text of this extraordinary Life of Ambrose, written in brown and black ink by a single hand in a plain, round and well-spaced Carolingian minuscule that Bernhard Bischoff defined as ‘beste Mailänder Kalligraphie’. The De vita et meritis is a dense concoction of very different sources: biblical quotations can be found next to classical echoes that recall for instance pagan Roman authors like Virgil or Cicero. An analysis of the vocabulary suggests a ninth-century Carolingian background: as a matter of fact, the reference to the kingdom of Italy as the regnum italicum only features in charters and narrative sources from the reign of Louis the Pious (814–40) onwards. A late ninth-century date for the Milanese <libellus, as integrated in St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, 569, confirms this timeline for the compilation: the De vita et meritis is an exceptional product of the second generation of the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’.