Luke St Augustine's Gospels Corpus Christi Cambridge MS 286

Sedulius (sometimes with the nomen Coelius or Caelius, both of doubtful authenticity) was a Christian

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems ( oral or wri ...

of the first half of the 5th century.

Biography

Extremely little is known about his life. Sedulius is the Latin form of the

Irish name A formal Irish name consists of a given name and a surname. In the Irish language, surnames are generally patronymic in etymology but are no longer literal patronyms as, for example, most Icelandic names still are. The form of a surname varies ...

Siadhal. The only trustworthy information is given by his two letters to Macedonius, from which we learn that he devoted his early life, perhaps as a teacher of rhetoric, to secular literature. Late in life he converted to

Christianity Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the world's largest and most widespread religion with roughly 2.38 billion followers representing one-third of the global pop ...

, or, if a Christian before, began to take his faith more seriously. One medieval commentary states that he resided in Italy. He is termed a

presbyter Presbyter () is an honorific title for Christian clergy. The word derives from the Greek ''presbyteros,'' which means elder or senior, although many in the Christian antiquity would understand ''presbyteros'' to refer to the bishop functioning a ...

by Isidore of Seville and in the

Gelasian decree The Gelasian Decree ( la, Decretum Gelasianum) is a Latin text traditionally thought to be a Decretal of the prolific Pope Gelasius I, bishop of Rome from 492–496. The work reached its final form in a five-chapter text written by an anonymous sc ...

Works

His fame rests mainly upon a long poem, ''Carmen paschale'', based on the four

gospel Gospel originally meant the Christian message (" the gospel"), but in the 2nd century it came to be used also for the books in which the message was set out. In this sense a gospel can be defined as a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words a ...

s. In style a bombastic imitator of

Virgil Publius Vergilius Maro (; traditional dates 15 October 7021 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: th ...

, he shows, nevertheless, a certain freedom in the handling of the Biblical story, and the poem soon became a quarry for the minor poets. His description of the Four Evangelists in ''Carmen Paschale'' became well-known; the English translation below is from . His other writings include an Abecedarian hymn in honour of Christ, '' A solis ortus cardine'', consisting of twenty-three quatrains of

iambic dimeter An iamb () or iambus is a metrical foot used in various types of poetry. Originally the term referred to one of the feet of the quantitative meter of classical Greek prosody: a short syllable followed by a long syllable (as in () "beautiful (f. ...

s. This poem has partly passed into the liturgy, the first seven quatrains forming the Christmas hymn "A solis ortus cardine";This incipit was borrowed for the Carolingian ''

Planctus de obitu Karoli The ''Planctus (de obitu) Karoli'' ("Lament n the Deathof Charlemagne"), also known by its incipit ''A solis ortu'' (''usque ad occidua'') ("From the rising of the sun o the setting), is an anonymous medieval Latin ''planctus'' eulogising Charlem ...

''; see Peter Godman (1985), ''Latin Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance'' (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), 206–211. and the Epiphany hymn, "Hostis Herodes impie." A "Veteris et novi Testamenti collatio" in

elegiac couplet The elegiac couplet is a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than the epic. Roman poets, particularly Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, adopted the same form in Latin many years late ...

s has also come down.

Editions

* Faustino Arévalo (Rome, 1794), reprinted in

Jacques Paul Migne Jacques Paul Migne (; 25 October 1800 – 24 October 1875) was a French priest who published inexpensive and widely distributed editions of theological works, encyclopedias, and the texts of the Church Fathers, with the goal of providing a ...

's '' Patrologia Latina'' vol. xix. * Johann Huemer (Vienna, 1885). *Victoria Panagl (Bearb.), Sedulius, ''Opera Omnia, Ex Recensione Iohannis Huemer'' (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 10), Wien, 2007, XLVII, 532 S. *

References

Sources

* This work in turn cites: **Johann Huemer, ''De Sedulii poetae vita et scriptis commentatio'' (Vienna, 1878) ** Max Manitius, ''Geschichte der christlich-lateinischen Poesie'' (Stuttgart, 1891) **Teuffel-Schwabe, ''History of Roman Literature'' (Eng. trans.), 473 **Herzog-Hauck, ''Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie'', xviii. (Leipzig, 1906) **Smith and Wace, ''Dictionary of Christian Biography'' (1887)

External links