Agnellus

Agnellus is a name attested in this corpus only as the recipient of seven letters, drawn from two collections roughly a century apart: the letters of Ennodius of Pavia (active in northern Italy, c. 473/4-521) and the Register of Gregory the Great (pope 590-604). Because the database aggregates these under a single name, the record most likely conflates two or more distinct men, and possibly more, since Agnellus was a fairly common name in late-antique Italy. Several bishops named Agnellus are known from this era (for example at Ravenna, at Terracina/Fundi, and at Trent), and the name also appears among lay officials and clergy in Gregory's correspondence; the letters alone do not allow a confident identification with any one of them. He is therefore best described as an otherwise obscure correspondent of these Italian letter-writers, an ecclesiastic or official active in Ostrogothic and post-imperial Italy in the late fifth and sixth centuries, rather than a single securely identified individual.