04 — The Histories
Gregory’s Decem Libri Historiarum — the “Ten Books of Histories,” long and misleadingly titled the “History of the Franks”: its contents from Creation to the Gaul of Gregory’s own day, its avowedly religious purpose, and the complicated manuscript transmission through which it reached us, abridged and re-edited by later hands.
Tradition: Western (pre-Schism Gaul; father of Western hagiography)
The Histories are the reason Gregory matters to the wider world: without them the sixth century in Gaul would be very nearly dark. This section treats the work on its own terms — what it actually is, as against the “History of the Franks” that later ages made of it — and the textual history that gave it its afterlife, including the six-book abridgment that circulated in place of the whole. The interpretive question of how Gregory writes is reserved for Section 07; here the concern is the work’s shape, aim, and survival.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-decem-libri-historiarum.md | The ten books from Creation to 591: structure, scope, the great set-pieces (Clovis, the feuding grandsons of Clovis, Chilperic and Fredegund), and Gregory’s own summary of his corpus in the final chapter. |
| purpose-transmission-and-misnomer.md | Why “History of the Franks” is a misnomer; Gregory’s religious and episcopal purpose; the manuscript tradition, the seventh-century six-book recension, and Gregory’s plea to future copyists to leave the work whole. |
See Also
- Goffart versus Heinzelmann — the modern argument over what kind of book this is
- What Rests on Gregory — the events known only or chiefly from the Histories
- The Kings and the See — the political narrative the Histories carry
References
- Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
- Gregory of Tours. Libri Historiarum X. Ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison. MGH Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum I.1, 2nd ed. Hannover, 1951.
- Goffart, Walter. The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.