Reconfigured Relations: A New Perspective on the Relationship between Ambrose's De sacramentis and the Roman Canon Missae

Abstract:

The earliest certain witness to an anaphora that bears many obvious similarities to the Roman Canon Missae is found in Book 4 of Ambrose’s De Sacramentis. Scholars have characterized the relationship between the two texts, however, in remarkably contradictory ways. In this article, I demonstrate that Ambrose and the Roman Canon contain both earlier and later versions of a shared, core text. Through a careful examination of these two texts, I demonstrate that in each section of the respective anaphoral texts, distinct developments are clearly evident. This can be seen most clearly in the institution narrative, where there is a move to make the bread and cup narratives more symmetrical, but in ways that show both continuity and discontinuity to each other. We can no longer simply treat the text provided by Ambrose in De sacramentis as the earlier version of what became the Roman Canon. Instead, it is evidence of what was likely a wider phenomenon: the parallel development of Latin anaphoral texts that are based on both Greek Alexandrian sources and different biblical manuscripts. The evolution and redaction of the individual sections of each anaphora underwent independent redactions.