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Adapted from: The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. Cross, Livingstone; (OUP, 1983).
AMALARIUS of METZ (c.780–850 [or 851]), liturgical scholar. A pupil and admirer of Alcuin, he was a prominent figure in the Carolingian Renaissance. It seems likely that he was Bp. of Trier from c.809 to 813, when he was sent on a mission to Constantinople. He then retired to Hornbach and devoted himself to writing. In 835 he was appointed to administer the see of Lyons after the deposition of its archbishop, Agobard.
His principal treatise, the ‘De ecclesiasticis officiis’ (in four books, PL105.0985-1242D), which was partly an attempt to further the fusion of Roman and Gallican ceremonial practices, exercised great influence in the Middle Ages and remains a fundamental source for the history of liturgy. Its explanations of ritual are sometimes very fanciful and artificial, and at the Synod of Quiercy in 838 some of its contents were pronounced heretical and he was removed from Lyons.
Among his other surviving writings are a small treatise on the ceremonies of Baptism and the ‘Eclogae de officio missae’, a description of the Roman Pontifical Mass. He compiled an antiphonary which has not survived but can be partly reconstructed on the basis of references in another of his works. (The contention of J. Sirmond and some older scholars that the Bp. of Trier was a different person of the same name seems to have been generally abandoned.)
His ‘Regula Canonicorum et Sanctimonialium’, ‘Eclogae de Officio Missae’, and ‘Epistolae’ in J. P. Migne, PL 105. 815–1340; crit. edns. of his ‘Epistolae’ by E. Duemmler in MGH, Epistolae, 5 (1899), pp. 240–724, of his ‘Opera Liturgica Omnia’ by J. M. Hanssens, SJ (ST 138–140; 1948–50), with introd. and bibl. J. Sirmond, SJ, ‘De Duobus Amalariis’ in Opera Varia, 4 (Paris, 1696), cols. 641–7. R. Mönchemeier, Amalar von Metz (Kirchengeschichtliche Studien, 1, Hefte 3–4; 1893); [J.] A. Cabaniss, Amalarius of Metz (Amsterdam, 1954); W. Steck, Die Liturgiker Amalarius (Münchener theologische Studien, I. Historische Abteilung, 35; St Ottilien, 2000). O. B. Hardison, Jun., Christian rite and Christian drama in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, 1965), pp. 35–79. R.-J. Hesbert, OSB, ‘L’Antiphonaire d’Amalaire’, EL 94 (1980), pp. 176–94. C. A. Jones, A Lost Work by Amalarius of Metz: Interpolations in Salisbury Cathedral MS 154 (HBS, Subsidia 2; 2001). J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (Oxford, 1983), pp. 326–9.
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