05 — The Hagiographic Corpus
Gregory’s other, larger body of work: the eight books of miracles — the Glory of the Martyrs, the Glory of the Confessors, the four books On the Miracles of St. Martin, and the Suffering and Miracles of St. Julian — together with the Life of the Fathers, twenty lives of Gallic holy men, many of them his own kin. Here is the founding corpus of Latin hagiography and its theology of relics, healing, and the presence of the saints.
Tradition: Western (pre-Schism Gaul; father of Western hagiography)
If the Histories made Gregory the father of Frankish historical writing, his hagiographic books made him a father of Western hagiography — and they were, for Gregory himself, arguably the more important work: a systematic dossier of the virtus of the saints active at their tombs across Gaul. This section presents the corpus and the theology that unifies it: that the holy dead are present and powerful at their relics, and that the shrine is where heaven touches earth. This is the world of St. Martin’s shrine, described from the inside by the shrine’s own bishop.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-eight-books-of-miracles.md | The eight Miracula: the two books on martyrs and confessors, the four on Martin, and the one on Julian of Brioude; the count (Gregory’s own “seven books of Miracles and one of the Lives of the Fathers”), the relic-cures, and the theology of praesentia. |
| the-life-of-the-fathers.md | The Liber Vitae Patrum: twenty lives of Gallic bishops, abbots, and hermits, including Gregory’s own relatives; ascetic Gaul, the desert transplanted to the Auvergne, and the work that Fr. Seraphim Rose would translate for the Orthodox West. |
See Also
- The Shrine at Tours (St. Martin of Tours) — Gregory’s Miracles of St. Martin as the register of that shrine
- A Pre-Schism Western Father — the Orthodox sensibility of this relic-and-shrine world
- The Vita Patrum and St. Herman Press — the Orthodox reception of the Life of the Fathers
- Illness and the Vow — Gregory’s own relic-cure at the root of his vocation
References
- Gregory of Tours. Glory of the Martyrs and Glory of the Confessors. Trans. Raymond Van Dam. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988, 2004.
- Gregory of Tours. Life of the Fathers. Trans. Edward James. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2nd ed. 1991.
- Van Dam, Raymond. Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
- Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.