The Carmen de synodo ticinensi ("Song of the Synod of Ticinum") is a poem of nineteen stanzas of five lines each in iambic trimeter.[1] Shortly after the Synod of Pavia (Ticinum) in 698, the Carmen was written down in a cursive hand on some blank pages in a copy of the acts of the Council of Chalcedon. The same hand also added it to another manuscript. It records that the assembled churchmen made heavy use of ancient texts, perhaps including the manuscript in which it was later written. It is the principal contemporary source of the synod, which brought to an end the Schism of the Three Chapters in Italy.[2]

The poem is attributed to Stefanus m., either a teacher (magister) or monk (monachus), writing at the behest of King Cunincpert, who called the council and who is praised in the poem for re-building Modena.[3] He also credits King Aripert I with abolishing the "heresy of the Arians".[4]

Notes

  1. ^ Ludwig Bethmann, "Carmen de synodo ticinensi", MGH, SS Rer. Lang. (Hanover: 1878), pp. 190–91; and also Karl Strecker, MGH Poetae latini aevi Carolini, IV.ii, CXLV (Berlin: 1896), pp. 728–31
  2. ^ Nicholas Everett, Literacy in Lombard Italy, c. 568–774 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 286.
  3. ^ Michael Richter, Bobbio in the Early Middle Ages: The Abiding Legacy of Columbanus (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008), 87.
  4. ^ George Every, The Byzantine Patriarchate, 451–1204 (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1947), 70: Rex Haribertus, pius et catholicus, Arrianorum abolevit haeresem.
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