09 — Legacy and Reception

Ambrose as one of the four great Latin Doctors and a pre-schism Western father venerated in the Orthodox East; his death, relics, and iconography; and the modern scholarship that has reassessed his life.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

Part of the St. Ambrose of Milan Reference Guide. This section contains two content files:

File	Summary
doctor-of-the-church.md	Doctor of the Church — Ambrose as one of the four great Latin Doctors (with Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great), formally so named in 1298; his death on Good Friday 397 and his relics in the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio, where they rest beside the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius; his iconography (the beehive, the scourge); and his veneration in the Eastern Orthodox Church as a pre-schism Western father, feast December 7.
modern-scholarship.md	Modern Scholarship — the principal modern study of Ambrose: F. Homes Dudden’s older standard The Life and Times of St. Ambrose (1935); Neil B. McLynn’s revisionist Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (1994), which reads the bishop as a master of political self-fashioning and recasts the Thessalonica episode; Daniel H. Williams on the Arian conflicts; Boniface Ramsey’s accessible introduction and translations; and the critical editions and the recovered voice of Ambrose’s opponents.

File

Summary

doctor-of-the-church.md

Doctor of the Church — Ambrose as one of the four great Latin Doctors (with Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great), formally so named in 1298; his death on Good Friday 397 and his relics in the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio, where they rest beside the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius; his iconography (the beehive, the scourge); and his veneration in the Eastern Orthodox Church as a pre-schism Western father, feast December 7.

modern-scholarship.md

Modern Scholarship — the principal modern study of Ambrose: F. Homes Dudden’s older standard The Life and Times of St. Ambrose (1935); Neil B. McLynn’s revisionist Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (1994), which reads the bishop as a master of political self-fashioning and recasts the Thessalonica episode; Daniel H. Williams on the Arian conflicts; Boniface Ramsey’s accessible introduction and translations; and the critical editions and the recovered voice of Ambrose’s opponents.

09 — Legacy and Reception

See Also