Melissa Markauskas - Bishops, Heresy and the Law: Ambrose of Milan, Governor and Bishop, and the Mechanics of Enforcing Orthodoxy

This paper will argue for the importance of reconstructing a legal narrative history of the religious conflicts of Ambrose's episcopate. Setting aside a sharp "church/state" distinction, recent scholarship has begun to consider private power and networks as a means of achieving aims in the late Empire, making it important to consider how the men who developed episcopal authority did so using traditional Roman tools such as case law. 

Following Constantine's decriminalisation of Christianity, an influx of bishops diverted from civic careers entered the Church. The larger problem of how bishops could enforce orthodoxy through civil law has received an exciting new approach (e.g. Humfress, 2007), which has been well-illustrated for Augustine of Hippo (Hermanowicz, 2008)-- but not yet for Ambrose. In addition, it has been argued that the "rhetoric" of post-Classical law, what has previously been considered extraneous verbiage, can offer crucial clues to the ideological context of those laws (Harries, forthcoming.), adding to the necessity to investigate the law in concert with episcopal rhetoric.

Like Augustine, Ambrose of Milan was trained in forensic rhetoric, and furthermore achieved a much higher position in the Roman civil bureaucracy, governor of Aemilia-Liguria, before being elevated to the episcopate. He was bishop of the Western imperial capital during the career of Theodosius I, institutor of the principal laws sanctioning religious deviance, and participated in several key religious controversies of the late fourth century. 

The fourth-century enforcement of orthodoxy has traditionally been understood to involve parallel, but separate processes of episcopal anathema and imperial anti-'religious deviance' laws.  This paper will suggest how a legal narrative perspective, combining the approaches of Harries, Humfress and Hermanowicz, can offer a new context for our understanding of Ambrose's participation in religious conflicts and of his contributions to the accretion of late Antique case law.