Nanterre and the Gallo-Roman World

Genevieve was born about 419/423 at Nanterre, a small town on the Seine a few miles west of Paris, into the Gallo-Roman society of a fifth century in which the Western Roman order was visibly failing. Her birth-date is not recorded but inferred, and is given as a range; her parents are named only by the Vita. This file sets the firm and the uncertain of her origins against the world she was born into.

Tradition: Western (pre-Schism, Gallo-Roman Gaul)

The Town and the Date

Genevieve — in the Latin of her earliest Life, Genovefa — was born at Nanterre (Nemptodorum), a settlement on the left bank of the Seine a short distance west of Paris, in the opening decades of the fifth century (Vita Genovefae 1, ed. Krusch, MGH SRM 3, 1896; trans. McNamara, Halborg, and Whatley, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, 1992, “Genovefa,” §1). No document records the year of her birth. It is estimated backward from the ages the tradition gives — she was, the Vita says, about seven when Germanus of Auxerre passed through in 429, and she lived into old age — and modern reference works accordingly place her birth in a band rather than on a year.

[Disputed: Genevieve’s birth is variously dated c. 419/420 and c. 422/423, and her death c. 502 or c. 512, with her age at death given as somewhere between the late seventies and the low nineties. The dates are not documented but computed from the ages the Vita Genovefae supplies and from its synchronisms with datable events (Germanus’ journey of 429; the death of Clovis in 511); reference works and translators give ranges, not fixed years (McNamara, Halborg, and Whatley, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, 1992, “Genovefa,” introduction, giving c. 423–502; Encyclopædia Britannica, “Saint Genevieve,” giving c. 422 – c. 500). This compendium reports the range and fixes neither end.]

Her parents are named by the Vita as Severus and Gerontia, and the text presents them as people of some standing — the later tradition and some readings of the Vita make her father a man of local prominence, though the Vita’s own social placement of the family is modest and has been read in more than one way (Vita Genovefae 1; trans. McNamara et al., “Genovefa,” §1; Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes de sainte Geneviève de Paris, 1986, on the family and the reliability of the detail). What the source gives with confidence is only the shape: a Christian child of a Christian household in a Romanized town within the orbit of Paris, at the moment when that world was passing.

The Gallo-Roman World of the Fifth Century

To understand Genevieve at all is to see the world she was born into, because her whole public significance is bound to its crisis. Fifth-century Gaul was still, in her childhood, Roman: Latin-speaking, town-centred, governed in form by the imperial administration and its local aristocracies, and by the fifth century thoroughly if unevenly Christian, its cities seats of bishops who were increasingly the effective leaders of civic life as imperial power receded (Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd ed., Blackwell, 2003, on the Gallo-Roman episcopate and the shift of civic authority to bishops; Ralph W. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism and Religious Controversy in Fifth-Century Gaul, Catholic University of America Press, 1989, on the Gallic Church of the period). Paris itself — the civitas of the Parisii, the island-city of Lutetia on the Île de la Cité — was in this age a modest but strategically placed river-town on the Seine, not yet the capital it would become under the Franks.

The century was one of accelerating breakdown. The Rhine frontier had been overrun in the winter of 406–407, opening Gaul to the movements of the Vandals, Alans, Sueves, and others; the Visigoths were settled in Aquitaine by treaty in 418; the Burgundians were established in the south-east; and behind all of these pressed the Huns, whose westward campaign under Attila would reach Gaul in 451, in Genevieve’s own maturity (Herwig Wolfram, The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples, University of California Press, 1997, on the fifth-century settlements in Gaul; J. B. Bury, The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians, Macmillan, 1928, on the sequence of incursions). The Western imperial government, its authority in Gaul exercised through generalissimos such as Aëtius and through an increasingly autonomous Gallo-Roman aristocracy, held the province together only precariously; within Genevieve’s lifetime the last Western emperor would be deposed (476), and the Salian Franks under Childeric and then Clovis would fill the vacuum in the north (Wolfram, The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples, 1997, on the Frankish ascendancy in northern Gaul).

This is the decisive context for everything the Vita attributes to her. Genevieve’s public deeds — steadying a city against the Huns, feeding it under blockade, standing between it and the Frankish kings — are precisely the deeds of the age’s crisis, the kind of civic-religious leadership that the collapse of the imperial order threw increasingly onto holy men and holy women and onto the bishops (Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2003, on the holy person as a figure of authority in the post-imperial West; Raymond Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, University of California Press, 1985, on charismatic and episcopal authority in Gaul). She belongs to the same Gallo-Roman Christian world as St. Martin of Tours, who had died in 397 and whose cult was already the great devotional fact of the Gallic Church, and as St. John Cassian, who was founding monasticism at Marseilles in the very years of her girlhood (on Martin, see St. Martin of Tours; on Cassian, St. John Cassian).

What Is Firm and What Is Not

The honest summary of Genevieve’s origins is short. Firm, in the sense of resting on the earliest source and cohering with the datable history: that she was a Christian woman of the Paris region, born in the early fifth century and living into old age across the transition from Roman to Frankish Gaul. Not firm: the exact years, which are computed and given as ranges; and the details of her parentage, which rest on the Vita alone and cannot be independently checked. The Vita Genovefae is a single source of debated date, and it is the whole of what we have for her childhood; this file, like the rest of the collection, therefore reports its claims as the Vita’s and dates them, rather than presenting them as documented fact (see The Vita Genovefae; What Can Be Known; METHODOLOGY §3.5).

That thinness is not a defect peculiar to Genevieve but the normal condition of fifth-century Gallo-Roman biography outside the very greatest figures. What can be recovered with confidence is less the individual life than the shape of a Christian woman’s holiness in a collapsing province — and that shape, drawn by the Vita and ratified by centuries of Parisian veneration, is what the following sections trace.

See Also

References

  • Vita Genovefae (“Vita A,” BHL 3335), ed. Bruno Krusch, in MGH Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum 3 (Hannover, 1896), 204–238, §1 (birth at Nanterre; parents Severus and Gerontia).
  • McNamara, Jo Ann, John E. Halborg, and E. Gordon Whatley, eds. and trans. Sainted Women of the Dark Ages. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. “Genovefa, Virgin of Paris,” 17–37 (translation and introduction; the c. 423–502 dating).
  • Heinzelmann, Martin, and Joseph-Claude Poulin. Les vies anciennes de sainte Geneviève de Paris: études critiques. Paris: Champion, 1986. (The family detail and the reliability of the Vita.)
  • Encyclopædia Britannica, “Saint Genevieve.” britannica.com/biography/Saint-Genevieve. (The c. 422 – c. 500 dating.)
  • Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. (The Gallo-Roman episcopate; the holy person’s authority in the post-imperial West.)
  • Wolfram, Herwig. The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. (The fifth-century settlements and the Frankish ascendancy in Gaul.)
  • Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (Charismatic and episcopal authority.)
  • Mathisen, Ralph W. Ecclesiastical Factionalism and Religious Controversy in Fifth-Century Gaul. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989. (The Gallic Church of the period.)