09 — Legacy
A sober assessment of the man and his afterlife: the father of Frankish history and one of the founders of Western hagiography, without whom the sixth century in Gaul would be nearly unknown; and a weighing of his greatness and his limits, as a saint, a bishop, and a writer.
Tradition: Western (pre-Schism Gaul; father of Western hagiography)
Few writers of the early Middle Ages have so decisively shaped what can be known of their age. This section takes the measure of Gregory’s achievement — his double foundation of historical and hagiographic writing in the Latin West — and offers a final, honest assessment that neither inflates him into an impartial historian he never claimed to be nor diminishes the saint and pastor behind the pen.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| father-of-western-hagiography.md | Gregory’s influence: the Histories as the fountainhead of Frankish and French historical writing, and the Miracula and Vita Patrum as a model for the Latin hagiography of the Middle Ages; his place among the founders of a genre. |
| assessment.md | A closing evaluation: the saint, the civic bishop, and the writer; what he gave and what he could not; how the collection holds together his role as source and his standing as a pre-Schism father. |
See Also
- Goffart versus Heinzelmann — the debate that any assessment must reckon with
- A Pre-Schism Western Father — his standing as a saint
- Value and Limits — his measure as a source
References
- Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
- Heinzelmann, Martin. Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century. Trans. Christopher Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
- Wood, Ian. The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751. London: Longman, 1994.