Search Results

This chapter examines how the cult of martyrs and saints promoted ideal responses to corporeal affliction. It examines the purging miracles recorded at the shrine of St. Martin of Tours, where health-giving violence experienced by the body in vomiting and intestinal purging was viewed as a template for divine power to purge the soul of sin. The chapter focuses on the purgatorial theology of Gregory of Tours, which identified the potion made of dust and water obtained at the tomb of St. Martin as a “celestial purgative.” It examines Gregory’s personal fears about his fate on judgement day.

This chapter focuses on the career of Aegidius. It is likely that Aegidius was from an upper class family or was of noble barbarian ancestry. Gregory of Tours suggests that Aegidius became magister militum in Gaul shortly after Majorian's accession. Priscus states that Aegidius served with Majorian under Aetius.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the kingdom of Soissons as appears in conventional scholarship and as redefined by Edward James. It then discusses evidence for Syagrius, Soissons, and northern Gaul; the reliability of Gregory of Tours; and titles attributed to Aegidius and Syagrius.

Chapter 1 examines the sixth-century foundation of female monastic authority in Poitiers and its model created through artifacts of Radegund’s life written by Gregory of Tours, Venantius Fortunatus, and Baudonivia. Radegund’s biographies articulated her sanctity and established Radegund’s two strategies for protecting her monastery: first, she relied on networks of allies, primarily bishops and kings, to support her; and second, she created a set of cultural ideas, symbols, and materials that later nuns used to attach new allies to the Abbey. Radegund left two holy objects that became key elements in the abbess’s efforts to assert her authority: the True Cross relic and her own physical relics. Radegund sought to free Sainte-Croix’s abbesses from their local bishop and connect them, instead, to the bishop of Tours, Frankish kings, the Byzantine emperor, and the papacy, believing that this would strengthen Sainte-Croix. Documents Radegund secured began an archive of privileges crucial to the authority of future abbesses.

This chapter evaluates various moments when detailed historical narratives survive for particular Rogation celebrations—such as for the Rogationtide of Paris in 580, a Rogationtide near Rheims in 743, and the Rogationtide of the Milanese Patarenes in 1066. These events have much in common. In all, popular holy men split off their followers from the rest of the congregation, church hierarchies condemned these holy men as heretics, Judaizers, or magicians, and competing processions emphasized factionalism, rather than solidarity. Because the march embodied the local community, the Rogation Days were a period of danger. The procession’s formal unity clashed with actual divisions on the ground. This incongruity guaranteed that the ritual could upset the local order if performed improperly just as easily as the rite could reinforce order.

Entering the postclassical world, this chapter examines what happened when Roman power structures were inhabited by so-called barbarian, do-nothing kings. Focusing in particular on the multilayered depiction of Chilperic I (c. 539–589) in the Histories of Gregory of Tours, the chapter shows that the Merovingian kings are rebuked not only for barbarous and un-Christian behaviors but also, surprisingly, for being ‘too Roman’. These critiques originate with local political and ecclesiastical elites, who feared a destabilizing displacement of their own authority and jurisdiction as the Merovingians strove to centralize their state after the model of Rome. Once again, therefore, foreignness of various kinds becomes the marker of a bad king, this time reflecting the interplay between the complex sociopolitical developments of the sixth century and the Roman imperial tradition.

This chapter discusses the early Middle Ages. It begins with a reading of Saint Augustine’s two cities, and reads him, along with Jerome and Paulus Orosius, in the context of the barbarian invasions. It moves to an analysis of the work of Boethius and Isidore of Seville and their attempts to preserve the classical heritage. The political context of the time is the fracturing of the West following the collapse of the Roman Empire. Yet this time is unfairly characterised as the ‘dark ages’. Christianity was in the ascendant, and there was a flowering of national histories of various Germanic tribes including Gregory of Tours on the Franks; Bede on the English; Isidore on the Goths; and Saxo Grammaticus on the Danes. These texts are not merely accounts of these people, but actively shape their sense of identity and consequent political practice. The chapter also provides an analysis of the land politics inherent in the Beowulf poem, both in terms of the economics of exchange, gifting and inheritance, but also a more ’geopolitical’ sense of conflict over land.

Western countries witnessed a sharp decline in their literary output, including the kinds of ecclesiastical writing that provide evidence about the state of contemporary liturgy and chant, in the later fourth century. The notable exception is monastic rules, such as from Gaul, Caesarius of Arles, and Aurelian of Arles, and, from contemporary Italy, the Rule of the Master and the incomparable Rule of St. Benedict. The sermons of Caesarius of Arles and the historical works of Gregory of Tours furnish many scattered remarks about ecclesiastical song in Gaul, and while the majority of these are more relevant to the Office, there are a number of valuable references to the Mass. Later-fourth-century Mass psalmody, certainly, is lector chant, whereas the Roman Mass Proper of the seventh and eighth centuries is schola chant. The lector declaims a psalm and the congregation responds, in some pattern or another, with the response verse. Schola chant involves the creation of a large body of chant and its maintenance from year to year, related tasks that can be accomplished only by an established group of quasi-professional musicians.

Chapter 2 examines the first tests of Radegund’s two strategies for protecting Sainte-Croix through three examples. First, it traces Radegund’s pursuit and installation of a prestigious relic at Sainte-Croix, over the hostile objections of her local bishop, through the support of kings, emperors, and more prominent bishops. Second, the chapter recalls the absence of this hostile bishop from Radegund’s funeral and how the Sainte-Croix’s Abbess Agnes calls on Gregory of Tours for assistance. And third, it examines the struggles of Leubovera, first abbess after the death of Sainte-Croix’s “founding generation,” as she dealt with an extensive rebellion within Sainte-Croix. All three of these women succeed over their local officials or rivals through the support of Frankish kings and bishops, whose alliances Radegund had established and subsequent leaders in the monastery cultivated.

This chapter focuses on interdynastic marriage in Roman successor states beyond the Alps, the kingdoms of the Merovingian Franks and the Anglo-Saxons during the northern European conversions to Christianity. It considers religious conversion stories that document the expansion of a Latin-based, premodern diplomatic society, beginning with a discussion of Historiae, Gregory of Tours's account of the Burgundian princess Clothilde's conversion of her Frankish husband, Clovis, and its place in the history of marriage diplomacy. The chapter proceeds by analyzing Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, which suggests that clerics may have supplanted royal women as actors in the expansion of diplomatic society after the great conversions. Gregory of Tours and Bede both advocated interdynastic marriage as a vehicle for the Christianization of Europe. Clerical marriage was a regular feature of diocesan life in sixth-century Francia, and Gregory frequently refers to the wives of priests and of his brother bishops.

In the West, Arian Gothic administrations seem less interested in the active anti-Jewish programs of their Nicene counterparts and less susceptible to the pressures of Nicene bishops. Jewish advisors, such as one Symmachus, served in the court of Theoderic. Gregory of Tours recounts how his catholic colleague, Avitus of Clermont, forced Jews in sixth-century Clermont to convert—strikingly reminiscent of the account about events on Minorca. In Gregory’s writings, synagogues are sometimes attacked, yet Jews participate in public life in major towns like Orleans. The late sixth-century letters of Gregory the Great depict a landscape still populated by unconverted Jews, dissident Christians, and recalcitrant practitioners of ancestral religions. They provide glimpses of Christian attacks on synagogues and Jewish rights, complexities of life for often impoverished newly converted Jews, and strategies to evade restrictions on Jewish slaveholding. Gregory advocated kindness and persuasion, rather than violence and coercion, but his relatively irenic stance toward Jews would not prevail.

After a brief consideration of the end of Vandal rule and a summary of the book’s conclusions, this epilogue treats Homoian Christianity across the successor kingdoms. It compares the ecclesiastical politics of post-imperial Africa with those of Italy, Gaul, and Spain, focusing on three central issues: efforts toward Christian uniformity, the relationship between ethnic and Christian identity, and the conduct of ecclesiastical controversy through heresiology and debate. It argues that Homoian Christianity had a similar range of potential consequences across the Visigothic, Burgundian, and Ostrogothic kingdoms. What separates the Vandal kingdom from its transmarine neighbors are crucial differences of degree, which manifested themselves most clearly in those moments where ecclesiastical controversy was made to matter. Vandal Africa was not an outlier in the post-imperial West.

This chapter examines the varieties and methods of Christian conversion in early medieval Europe. Christians made repeated attempts to adjust Christian convictions to the realities of people who practiced a variety of nature religions. Two cultural worlds interacted in a reciprocal process of adding and subtracting, creating and destroying. One way to understand the perspective of missionaries and the conundrum they faced is to think in terms of a sliding scale, varying in time and place; some aspects of pre-Christian beliefs were deemed incompatible whereas other pre-Christian rituals were accepted by absorption and adoption. At the bare minimum, conversion meant a transfer of loyalty or allegiance, confirmed by baptism. If there was rudimentary instruction, conversion meant familiarity with the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer and the acceptance of church authority. Methods of conversion varied, from “words” (proclamation of the word) to “deeds” (conversion through miracles and profaning paganism).

The first two sections of the chapter illustrate continuity with late antique and classical historiography in the areas of History as Identity, History as Memorialization, and History as Lesson. Remaining sections show that within historically oriented medieval thought there were three tendencies for which the medieval world is not generally renowned: the conceptualization of human cultural difference over time, with its associations of an awareness of anachronism and accompanying debates over the relevance of the past to the present; a literal sense of the past, with its associations of specificity and accuracy; and the capacity for often quite sophisticated source criticism. As we traverse time and place, distinctions between Latin and vernacular Histories also become relevant, as do distinctions between, say, monastic Histories and urban Histories, or baronial and royal genealogies. Each of these sorts of History had the potential to imply a different scale and periodization of time—a different ‘temporality’—as did technical and economic developments. A section is devoted to religious hermeneutics and theological–philosophical shifts, some of which cohered with Christian History as Speculative Philosophy, some of which ran separately to it, and some of which stood in tension with it. In the eleventh–thirteenth centuries the clergy made a great contribution to developments in source evaluation, and increasingly their endeavours took account of the different contexts in which the sacred texts had been written and those in which they were read.

The Introduction sketches Superior Women’s argument that the abbesses of Sainte-Croix relied upon two complementary strategies in claiming and exercising their authority throughout the medieval period: relying first for support from a network of allies made up of male officials, and second on cultural artifacts related to the abbey’s founder Saint Radegund to engage new patrons and supporters. The chapter situates this argument in the existing scholarship on medieval women and gender and of medieval monasticism and hagiography, particularly examining existing narratives about monastic women and authority. The status of Sainte-Croix’s abbesses remained consistent across the millennium of this study, largely as a result of their consistent use of these two strategies.

This chapter discusses the unavoidability of competition, even among those who renounce the more common forms of competitions for honor, wealth, and so forth. It starts with a discussion of the Garden of Eden and conditions of zero scarcity therein, with but one scarce item: the forbidden fruit. Then the chapter goes on to positional goods, rank-ordering people, which leads to a discussion of seating arrangements, musical chairs, and the failure of King Arthur to resolve the matter with a round table. It then provides a treatment of Christian attempts to avoid honor competitions by elevating humility to the status of one of the chief virtues. But that ends in humility contests and we are back to square one. The chapter ends with a sublime text from Gregory of Tours about a truly humble miracle-working young monk and the efforts to keep him humble despite his miracle-working powers.

Short conclusion to the work and summary of main themes. When the Lives are studied as a complete dossier, they show complementary and interconnected themes and concerns. This Epilogue provides a summary of the context and motivation behind the writing of Jonas’s three saints’ Lives. Jonas’s hagiography shows the growing alliance between monasteries and secular authorities in the seventh century. This was a time of dynamic social, political, and religious change, processes that are reflected in many ways in Jonas’s own life and works.