Writing Ravenna: The Liber Pontificalis of Andreas Agnellus (review)

308 Reviews Pizarro, Joaquin Martinez, Writing Ravenna: The Liber Pontificalis Andreas Agnellus, A n n Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995; pp. x, 213; R.R.P. U S $39.50; £30.00. A church chronicle sounds unpromising material for a literary analysis, but Agnellus' biographies of the bishops of Ravenna, which begin with its patron saint Apollinaris, sent from Rome by St Peter himself, and end abruptly with the death of Agnellus's hated contemporary George, is no ordinary chronicle. While of the same genre as Rome's Liber pontificalis, Agnellus' work is not a compilation added to over the centuries but a unique composition by an abbot and member of the local aristocracy w h o was writing towards the middle of the ninth century in a city under the shadow of the Carolingians and the Papacy. Ostensibly, and very likely in fact, the account was read in instalments to a sympathetic local audience in the process of its composition. For the early centuries Agnellus used legendary and then historical sources, including the inscriptions in mosaic and stone which he transcribed himself in the churches built back in the fifth and sixth centuries when Ravenna was home successively to the imperial court, the Ostrogothic kings and Byzantium's administrators. For the more recent centuries anecdotal and moralising stories become more prominent and it is here particularly that Pizarro has rich material for his study. Pizarro lays the groundwork by examining first the political situation of Ravenna, since this influenced Agnellus' choice of individual stories, and then the abbot's synthesis of oral and written narrative which w a s larded with comments based on his o w n local knowledge and partisan views. Four stories are selected for analysis by Pizarro in the second part of the book, all of them characterised by lively dialogue. Since Reviews 309 the text, in a far from classical Latin, is not yet available in an English translation, Pizarro begins each section giving Agnellus' narrative vignettes in English. H e shows h o w the first of these, the account of Archbishop John dissuading Attila and his Huns from attacking the city in 452, is a local variant of the story of Pope Leo the Great saving Rome, but presented in the form of a confrontation between secular and ecclesiastical powers. The tale of Rosimund's murder in 572 of her husband Alboin, the Langobard king of Italy, and her own death in Ravenna, for which Paul the Deacon is Agnellus' source, is recast in misogynist terms denouncing male weakness in the face of female dominance and a wife's treachery. Third is the account of neighbourhood m o b violence and a premeditated massacre ofrivalsin Ravenna under Archbishop Damian ca A D 700, which was followed by a liturgical procession of penance. This drama is described with a Vergilian flavour and considerable rhetorical effects. The fourth story is of the highly accomplished and saintly scribe Johannicius, an ancestor of Agnellus w h o worked for a time in the imperial service in Constantinople. After his return home he was among the prominent citizens of Ravenna deported to Constantinople in 709 following Justinian II's recovery of the throne and there tortured and killed for sedition. The story of Agnellus' ancestor is given precedence over that of Ravenna's Archbishop Felix who, though blinded in Constantinople, was released. Again Agnellus attempts an almost epic style although, as Pizarro notes, this material concerning members of his family should have been kept subordinate to the main thrust of the chronicle. Pizarro thus pinpoints the unevenness, from a modern perspective, of Agnellus' writing. Stock motifs, established tales and quite elaborate narrative structures are identified and shown to serve Agnellus' o w n didactic and often moralising purposes. Indeed Agnellus himself admits that when he was short of material 310 Reviews for any of his biographies he resorted to invention and that he was intent on holding the interest of his audience. Sometimes an excursus is developed from an etymological explanation or from a passage of scripture. However, Pizarro concentrates his study on the secular stories and traces the reshaping of the narratives, addressing only occasionally...