The “Rustic” Latin

Gregory repeatedly apologized for the crudeness of his Latin — his rusticitas, his want of grammar and polish — and for centuries readers took him at his word, filing him among the semi-literate chroniclers of a declining age. Modern philology has complicated that picture: is the “rustic” Latin real linguistic change, a conventional modesty topos, or an artful self-positioning? This file examines the language question as one facet of the larger debate over what kind of writer Gregory was.

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

Gregory’s Apologies

Gregory returns, in his prefaces, to a persistent theme of self-deprecation about his own Latin. He professes himself unskilled in the liberal arts, ignorant of grammar and rhetoric, writing in a rude and rustic style (rusticitas), and he half-apologizes for inflicting such crude prose on his readers — even reporting, in one preface, that he was reproached in a dream for hesitating to write on account of his lack of learning, and told that what mattered was to be understood by the people (Gregory of Tours, Hist. I, prol. and IX.31; the preface to Glory of the Martyrs; trans. Thorpe, Penguin, 1974; Van Dam, Glory of the Martyrs, Liverpool, 1988). He famously worried that grammarians would mock him for confusing genders, misusing cases and prepositions, and writing ab for ex — the small solecisms of a man whose Latin had drifted from the classical norm (Gregory, prefaces; Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Manheim, 1965).

And there is a real substratum here. Gregory’s Latin is genuinely different from classical Latin: its grammar is simplified, its syntax looser, its vocabulary and spelling shaped by the spoken Latin of sixth-century Gaul that was beginning its long evolution toward the Romance languages (Bonnet, Le latin de Grégoire de Tours, Paris, 1890; Auerbach, Literary Language, 1965). The apologies are not pure invention: Gregory did write a Latin that a Ciceronian would have found barbarous, and he knew it.

The Modesty Topos

But the apologies cannot be read straight, because self-deprecation of exactly this kind was a convention — the “modesty topos” (affected modesty), a standard rhetorical move by which an author disarms criticism and claims humility by disparaging his own abilities (Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Trask, 1953, on the modesty topoi; Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, Princeton, 1988). An author who protests his rusticity is doing something his educated readers would recognize as a gesture, not necessarily a confession; and the very fluency and rhetorical control with which Gregory laments his lack of rhetoric is itself evidence that the lament is partly performance (Goffart, Narrators, 1988; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, trans. Carroll, Cambridge, 2001). A man who could not write could not have written the Histories; the disclaimer and the achievement sit oddly together unless the disclaimer is, in part, a topos.

This recognition is what turned the language question into a facet of the larger debate over Gregory’s artistry (see Goffart versus Heinzelmann). If the “rustic Latin” apology is a conventional gesture rather than a simple fact, then the “naive Gregory” built upon it collapses, and the writer behind the modest mask comes into view as something more deliberate (Goffart, 1988; Heinzelmann, 2001).

What Modern Philology Makes of It

Modern scholarship has held together the two truths that the older reading kept apart: Gregory’s Latin is both genuinely non-classical and deployed by a purposeful, capable writer. The foundational philological study, Max Bonnet’s Le latin de Grégoire de Tours (1890), demonstrated in exhaustive detail the features of Gregory’s language — the departures from classical grammar, the influence of the spoken tongue, the biblical and liturgical coloring — establishing that his Latin is a real and coherent linguistic variety, not mere incompetence (Bonnet, 1890). Erich Auerbach, in his study of late-Latin literary language, read Gregory’s style as expressive of a new, more immediate relationship between the writer and the concrete, sensory world — a “creatural” realism that classical decorum had excluded, and that gives Gregory’s narratives their vividness (Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Trask, 1953, ch. 4, “Sicharius and Chramnesindus”; Auerbach, Literary Language, 1965). On this reading the “rusticity” is not a failure of art but a different art — plainer, closer to speech, capable of a directness the high style could not achieve.

More recent scholarship has pressed the point further: Gregory’s choice to write in an accessible, unpretentious Latin was, at least in part, a choice, suited to his purpose of reaching and edifying a wide Christian audience rather than a narrow literary elite (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001; Goffart, Narrators, 1988). His stated wish — echoed in the dream-reproach — to be understood by the people, and his conviction that the truth of the saints mattered more than the polish of the prose, fit a writer who subordinated classical form to Christian communication (Gregory, prefaces; Heinzelmann, 2001). The rusticity, whether wholly chosen or partly imposed by the linguistic situation, serves a purpose Gregory embraced.

The Language Question and the Man

The debate over Gregory’s Latin thus mirrors, in miniature, the debate over Gregory the writer. Take the apologies at face value and one gets the old naive chronicler; recognize the topos and the purposeful style and one gets a deliberate author who wrote plainly on principle. Neither extreme is quite right: Gregory’s Latin really had drifted from the classical norm, and he really was a capable, purposeful writer who made that Latin serve him (Bonnet, 1890; Auerbach, 1965; Goffart, 1988; Heinzelmann, 2001). The “rustic” style is best understood not as the ceiling of his ability but as the register he adopted — a Christian, accessible, vivid Latin fit for the edification of the faithful and the glory of the saints, apologized for in the conventional manner and wielded with more skill than the apology admits.

For the reader of Gregory this has a practical consequence, of a piece with the source-critical cautions elsewhere in this collection (see Value and Limits): one should not mistake his plainness for simplicity, nor his self-deprecation for the whole truth about him. The bishop who protested that he knew no rhetoric wrote the most vivid prose of his century and shaped the memory of an age. The “rustic” Latin is the voice of a writer who chose to be understood — and who has been read, and argued over, for fourteen hundred years.

See Also

• Goffart versus Heinzelmann — the larger debate of which the language question is one facet
• The Decem Libri Historiarum — the prose in question
• Value and Limits — reading Gregory’s plainness without mistaking it for simplicity
• The Episcopal Aristocracy — Gregory’s biblical rather than classical education

References

• Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. (I, prol., and the prefaces; the apologies for rusticitas; the dream-reproach.)
• Gregory of Tours. Glory of the Martyrs. Trans. Raymond Van Dam. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988. (The preface and its modesty.)
• Bonnet, Max. Le latin de Grégoire de Tours. Paris: Hachette, 1890. (The foundational study of Gregory’s language; its non-classical features as a coherent variety.)
• Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953 (ch. 4, on Gregory’s “creatural” realism); and Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Pantheon, 1965. (Gregory’s style as a new late-Latin literary language.)
• Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. (The modesty topos.)
• Goffart, Walter. The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. (The “rustic Latin” apology as topos; Gregory’s purposeful plainness.)
• Heinzelmann, Martin. Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century. Trans. Christopher Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (The chosen accessible style; the wish to reach the people.)