Purpose, Transmission, and the “History of the Franks” Misnomer

The familiar title History of the Franks is not Gregory’s and is, in the judgment of modern scholars, something of a misnomer: Gregory wrote a Christian history centered on the Church, the saints, and the moral drama of his age, not a national history of a people. This file examines the work’s true purpose and its complicated afterlife — the manuscript tradition, the seventh-century abridgment into six books, and Gregory’s disregarded plea that his ten books be kept whole.

Tradition: Western (pre-Schism Gaul; father of Western hagiography)

A Misleading Title

Gregory called his work simply the Histories — Decem Libri Historiarum, “Ten Books of Histories” (Gregory of Tours, Hist., title and X.31, ed. Krusch and Levison, MGH SRM I.1, 1951). The now-standard title Historia Francorum, “History of the Franks,” is not his; it was fastened onto the work by later transmission, and modern scholarship regards it as misleading (Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, Princeton, 1988; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, trans. Carroll, Cambridge, 2001). The reasons are plain from the text itself. A “history of the Franks” would begin with the Franks and follow their fortunes as a people; Gregory begins with the Creation of the world and a profession of the Catholic faith, gives an entire book to sacred history before the Franks appear at all, and throughout subordinates the doings of the Frankish kings to the affairs of the Church and the saints (Gregory, Hist. I, prol. and I.1; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001). As has often been observed, Gregory is less interested in the Frankish kingdom as such than in the Church within it — its saints, its bishops, its heresies and orthodoxies, its moral condition (Goffart, Narrators, 1988; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001).

To call the book the “History of the Franks” is therefore to impose on it a secular, national, ethnographic purpose that Gregory did not have — the very misreading that made him, for centuries, look like the naive chronicler of a barbarous people rather than the theologically purposeful writer that recent scholarship has recovered (Goffart, Narrators, 1988; see Goffart versus Heinzelmann). This collection uses “Histories” (or Decem Libri Historiarum) for accuracy, noting the traditional title where it aids recognition.

Gregory’s Purpose

What, then, was Gregory writing? His own prefaces answer. He opens with a confession of faith — a statement of Nicene orthodoxy against the Arianism of the Goths and the errors he means to refute — and he frames the whole as an account of “the wars of kings with hostile peoples, of martyrs with pagans, of churches with heretics” (Gregory, Hist. I, prol.; trans. Thorpe, Penguin, 1974). The Histories are a work of Christian and episcopal purpose: to record the triumphs and trials of the orthodox faith in Gaul, to display the power of God and the saints, to hold up good and bad kings and bishops for judgment, and to place the violence and confusion of his own century within the providential order (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001; Breukelaar, Historiography and Episcopal Authority in Sixth-Century Gaul, Göttingen, 1994).

This purpose explains the features that puzzled older readers: the mixing of miracles with massacres, the moral verdicts on kings, the ending of Book I with St. Martin, the constant intrusion of the saints into the affairs of state. Gregory was not writing to inform posterity about Frankish institutions but to bear witness — as a bishop — to the working of God and the saints in a fallen world, and to warn and edify (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001). The Histories are, in this sense, continuous with his hagiographic books: both record the virtus of God in the world, one in the affairs of kings, the other at the tombs of the saints (Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul, Princeton, 1993; see The Eight Books of Miracles).

The Plea to the Copyists

Gregory knew that a book’s survival lay in the hands of those who copied it, and at the close of the tenth book he made an extraordinary appeal. Having listed his works, he adjured all the bishops who would succeed him at Tours, “by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and by the Day of Judgment,” to preserve his books complete and unaltered — never to have them destroyed or rewritten, never to select some parts and suppress others, but to keep them whole as he had left them (Gregory, Hist. X.31; trans. Thorpe, Penguin, 1974). The vehemence of the plea shows that Gregory anticipated exactly what would happen: that later hands would find his sprawling, ecclesiastically-weighted, morally-charged Histories unwieldy, and would cut them down to a leaner narrative of kings and wars (Goffart, Narrators, 1988; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001).

The Six-Book Abridgment

His fear was justified. Within a century of his death, a six-book version of the Histories was produced — a recension that reduced Gregory’s ten books to the first six and, in doing so, systematically pruned away much of the ecclesiastical, miraculous, and moralizing material, leaving something closer to a straightforward political history of the Franks (Goffart, Narrators, 1988; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001; Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, Cambridge, 2015). This six-book text circulated widely in the early Middle Ages — arguably more widely, for a time, than the complete ten-book version — and it is precisely this abridgment, stripped of Gregory’s religious framing, that did most to create the later image of him as a secular “historian of the Franks” (Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity, 2015; Goffart, Narrators, 1988). Modern editors have shown that the six-book editors made deliberate, ideologically shaped choices about what to keep and what to remove, adapting Gregory to the concerns of their own seventh- and eighth-century present (Reimitz, 2015).

The influence of the abridged and adapted Gregory ran deep. The seventh-century Chronicle of Fredegar drew on Gregory, incorporating an epitome of his middle books while extending the story to its own day — and Fredegar’s version of Gregory appears to have lacked the last four books, further evidence of how the complete text was fragmented in transmission (Wallace-Hadrill, The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar, London, 1960; Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity, 2015). Through Fredegar and the six-book recension, an abridged, re-purposed Gregory shaped the whole later Frankish historical tradition.

The Recovery of the Whole Gregory

The complete ten-book Histories did survive, in a smaller number of manuscripts, and it is the whole work that modern critical scholarship has restored to the center of attention. The authoritative edition of Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison (MGH SRM I.1, 2nd ed. 1951) established the text on the basis of the full manuscript tradition, and it is on this foundation that the modern reassessment of Gregory rests (Krusch and Levison, 1951; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001). The recovery of the ten-book Gregory — the theologically purposeful bishop, not the six-book “historian of the Franks” — is the precondition of the entire modern debate over his craft (see Goffart versus Heinzelmann). Gregory’s plea to the copyists was defied for centuries; but in the end, the book he wanted preserved is the book scholarship now reads.

References

Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. (I, prol., the confession of faith and program; I.1; X.31, the works-list and the plea to the copyists.)
Gregory of Tours. Libri Historiarum X. Ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison. MGH Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum I.1, 2nd ed. Hannover, 1951. (The critical text based on the full manuscript tradition.)
Goffart, Walter. The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. (The “History of the Franks” as a misnomer; Gregory’s ecclesiastical rather than national purpose; the effect of the abridgment.)
Heinzelmann, Martin. Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century. Trans. Christopher Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (Gregory’s religious purpose; the whole-text reading; the plea to copyists.)
Reimitz, Helmut. History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550–850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. (The six-book recension, its ideological editing, and the transmission that made Gregory a “Frankish” historian.)
Wallace-Hadrill, J. M. The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its Continuations. London: Nelson, 1960. (Fredegar’s use and abridgment of Gregory; the missing last books.)
Breukelaar, Adriaan H. B. Historiography and Episcopal Authority in Sixth-Century Gaul. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994. (Gregory’s episcopal purpose.)