The Earliest Homilies on Mary’s Assumption: Ambrose Autpert and The Byzantine Tradition

Abstract

This article analyzes the earliest known Latin homily that explicitly treats the Assumption of Mary. Its author was Ambrose Autpert, a monk active at the monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno in central Italy between the late 740s and the early 780s. The article will identify a wide number of Latin sources and models for this homily, and argue that Autpert was aware of Greek homilies on the Assumption of Mary written a few decades earlier by prominent preachers such as Patriarch Germanos of Constantinople, the bishop of Gortyna known as Andrew of Crete, and the monk of Mar Saba John of Damascus. Autpert’s writing echoes and combines vivid formulas used in Greek homilies to extoll the Mother of God as the “ladder” and “gate” of heaven. Autpert’s perspective on the Assumption is not only strongly dependent on the Greek tradition but is also refreshingly innovative in the Latin tradition.