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Maximus of Turin

Maximus of Turin

380 CE465 CE · Turin

Maximus of Turin was the first historically attested bishop of Turin, serving from around 398 until his death shortly after 465. He is best known for a large corpus of homilies and sermons — over a hundred survive — organized around the liturgical year, the feasts of saints, and pastoral instruction, making him one of the most important Latin homilists of the post-Nicene West. His preaching addressed an audience still partly pagan, and he repeatedly denounced lingering rural superstitions while guiding his flock through the upheavals of barbarian incursions into northern Italy. Shaped by the Ambrosian episcopal tradition of Milan and the legacy of Eusebius of Vercelli's monastic-priestly school, he attended the Synod of Milan in 451, where northern Italian bishops accepted Leo I's Tome, and the Council of Rome in 465. His sermons entered the Roman Breviary and remain a primary source for fifth-century Latin liturgical theology and pastoral practice.

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Stop 1 of 1398–465Bishop, Homilist

TurinItaly

What they did here

Turin (ancient Augusta Taurinorum) was Maximus's sole documented seat; he served as its first historically attested bishop for roughly sixty-five years, preaching to a mixed Christian-pagan population amid barbarian pressures on the Po plain.

About Turin

Turin, the capital of Piedmont in northwestern Italy, an ancient see. Maximus of Turin was its bishop around 400 and left a large corpus of sermons.

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The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Maximus of Turin’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works

No works attributed in the corpus yet.