ECST 777 Sidonius Apollinaris
While attending to Sidonius's fifth-century circumstances, literary production and career, the course focuses particularly on his correspondence, which has much to tell us about his final years as a churchman. In spite of his conservatism and his involvement in the government of the western empire in its closing decades, he was able to identify changes afoot in a Gaul increasingly dominated by barbarian settler kingdoms, and the necessary adaptation those changes implied; and he found an easy place in the early medieval account of the period and province in which he lived. ECS graduates will be expected to read the texts in the original Latin; but that should not inhibit other graduates from other programs with different expectations: English translations are available of all Sidonius's work.