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Van Waarden ( J.A. ) , Kelly ( G. ) (edd.) New Approaches to Sidonius Apollinaris . With indices on Helga Köhler, C. Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius: Briefe Buch I. (Late Antique History and Religion 7.) Pp. xiv + 397. Leuven, Paris and Walpole, MA : Peeters , 2013. Cased, [euro]89. ISBN: 978-90-429-2928-9 .
Reviews
This volume is an excellent contribution to the study of Sidonius Apollinaris, for which its editors and all those involved ought to be congratulated. Each contribution provides advice and guidelines for specific aspects of a planned commentary of Sidonius' oeuvre, in line with the stated ambition of the Saxxi working group (Sidonius Apollinaris in the twenty-first century). The decision to publish this volume and resulting commentaries in English will remove an ongoing impediment to the exchange of ideas within Sidonian scholarship. The book is structured into three main parts: 'Cultural Diversity in Research', 'The Carmina: Poetics and Intertextuality' and 'The Epistulae: the Collection, Its Aims, and Its Language'. Amherdt, Köhler and Santelia offer summaries of French, German and Italian scholarship respectively. Amherdt's approach is chronological, Köhler's is largely focused on her 1990 commentary of Book 1 of Sidonius' Epistulae and Santelia's is thematic. This difference inhibits the reader from making more insightful comparisons between the research on Sidonius in each of the languages. Amherdt's criticism of nineteenth-century German scholarship (p. 32) devalues its ongoing usefulness. At times Santelia's piece reads like little more than a bibliography.
Gerbrandy offers a deliberately provocative analysis of Carm. 14 and 15. He dismisses Sidonius' claims to originality, but later is unaware of any contradiction when he characterises three innovative passages by Sidonius as 'disturbingly inept' (p. 68) and refers to the strangeness [originality!] of Sidonius' poetry (p. 76). Gerbrandy's approach suffers from an absolutist concept of innovation which wholly precludes the use of...