Maximus of Turin
380 CE–465 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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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, grew from the Roman colony of Augusta Taurinorum. Its Christian history includes Maximus, remembered as its first bishop around 400, whose sermons survive in large number. Turin became the capital of the Duchy of Savoy in 1563, later of the Kingdom of Sardinia, and from 1861 to 1865 served as the first capital of unified Italy. Its university, founded around 1404, educated Joseph-Louis Lagrange and counted Amedeo Avogadro and Giuseppe Peano among its professors, while the exiled French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy held a chair in the city in the early 1830s. The cathedral houses the relic known as the Shroud of Turin.
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.