Father of Frankish History and Western Hagiography

Gregory stands at the head of two traditions: he is the fountainhead of Frankish and French historical writing, and one of the founders of Latin hagiography. This file traces that double influence — the Histories as the source and model for the whole later Frankish historiographical tradition, and the Miracula and Vita Patrum as a template for the saints’ lives of the medieval West.

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

The Fountainhead of Frankish History

Gregory’s Histories are the foundation on which the entire later tradition of Frankish and French historical writing was built. For the sixth century they are, as we have seen, very nearly the sole continuous narrative; but their influence runs far beyond the events they record, because they became the model and the material for everyone who wrote the history of the Franks after him (Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, Longman, 1994; Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, Cambridge, 2015). The seventh-century Chronicle of Fredegar took Gregory as its base, epitomizing his middle books and continuing the story; the eighth-century Liber Historiae Francorum did the same; and through these intermediaries an abridged and adapted Gregory shaped the Carolingian and later understanding of the Frankish past (Wallace-Hadrill, The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar, London, 1960; Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity, 2015; see Purpose, Transmission, and the Misnomer).

The very title later ages gave his work — Historia Francorum, “History of the Franks” — testifies to this role: Gregory became, in the reception, the historian of the Frankish people, the writer to whom later generations turned to know their origins, even though he had written something both larger and different (Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, Princeton, 1988). He is, in a real sense, the father of French history — the first and greatest narrator of the age from which France would emerge, without whom the birth of Christian Gaul would be almost invisible (Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, 1994). Modern anglophone popular memory still knows the phrase “the father of French history” for exactly this reason.

A Founder of Latin Hagiography

Gregory’s influence on hagiography is at least as great, though less often noticed by non-specialists. His eight books of miracles and his Life of the Fathers constitute one of the largest and most influential bodies of saints’ writing to survive from late antiquity, and they helped fix the forms of medieval Latin hagiography (Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul, Princeton, 1993; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, trans. Carroll, Cambridge, 2001). In several respects Gregory was formative:

  • The miracle-collection as a genre. Gregory’s systematic dossiers of a saint’s posthumous wonders — the four books on Martin above all — provided a template for the libri miraculorum that would proliferate at shrines across the medieval West, the register of cures and punishments kept by a cult’s custodians (Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, 1993; Sigal, L’homme et le miracle dans la France médiévale, Paris, 1985, on the later tradition).
  • The theology of the shrine. Gregory gave the fullest early expression to the theology of praesentia and virtus — the saint present and powerful at the relic — that would organize the cult of the saints throughout the Middle Ages (Brown, The Cult of the Saints, Chicago, 1981; see The Eight Books of Miracles).
  • The collected Life of the Fathers. His Vita Patrum, gathering many lives under a single theological rubric, stands in the line of the desert Vitae Patrum and helped transmit that form to the Latin West, where collections of the lives of local holy men would become a staple of monastic and diocesan literature (James, Life of the Fathers, Liverpool, 1991, introduction; see The Life of the Fathers).

Because so many of the saints of Gaul are known to us only or chiefly through Gregory, he is not merely a model for later hagiography but the irreplaceable source for the cults he documented — Martin’s tomb-miracles, the confessors and martyrs of the Glory books, the ascetics of the Vita Patrum (Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, 1993). To this day, to write the life of many a Gaulish saint is to work from Gregory.

The Vividness That Endured

Part of Gregory’s enduring influence is simply literary: the vividness of his narratives has kept them alive when drier chronicles were forgotten. His concrete, speech-close Latin, once dismissed as barbarous, gives his stories a realism and immediacy that later, more polished writers rarely matched — the quarrels and feuds, the kings and bishops, the miracles and murders, rendered with a directness that made Erich Auerbach take Gregory as a landmark in the history of Western literary representation (Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Trask, 1953, ch. 4; see The Rustic Latin). The “rustic” style proved more durable than the classicizing prose of his contemporaries; Gregory is read, quoted, and argued over, and his sixth century lives in the imagination because he made it live on the page.

A Double Foundation

Gregory’s legacy is therefore a double foundation: he stands at the source of both the historical and the hagiographic writing of the Latin West — the two great narrative genres of the medieval Church, the history of peoples and the lives of saints, both flowing in large part from one bishop of Tours (Goffart, Narrators, 1988; Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, 1993; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001). And these were, for Gregory, not two enterprises but one: the single task of bearing witness to the working of God and the saints in the world, whether in the affairs of kings or at the tombs of the holy (see Purpose, Transmission, and the Misnomer). That the modern academy tends to prize the historian and the modern Orthodox revival tends to prize the hagiographer is a division Gregory himself would not have recognized. He wrote one testimony, in many books; and both halves of his achievement have shaped the West from his day to ours (see Assessment).

See Also

References

  • Goffart, Walter. The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. (Gregory as the head of the barbarian historiographical tradition; the reception as “historian of the Franks.”)
  • Wood, Ian. The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751. London: Longman, 1994. (Gregory’s centrality to Frankish history and its later writing.)
  • Reimitz, Helmut. History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550–850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. (Gregory’s afterlife in Fredegar, the Liber Historiae Francorum, and Carolingian historiography.)
  • Wallace-Hadrill, J. M. The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its Continuations. London: Nelson, 1960. (Fredegar’s dependence on Gregory.)
  • Van Dam, Raymond. Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (Gregory as founder and irreplaceable source of Gaulish hagiography.)
  • Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. (The theology of the shrine Gregory transmitted.)
  • Heinzelmann, Martin. Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century. Trans. Christopher Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (The unity of Gregory’s historical and hagiographic work.)
  • James, Edward, trans. Gregory of Tours: Life of the Fathers. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2nd ed. 1991. (The Vita Patrum in the tradition of the collected lives.)
  • Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. (Gregory’s vividness as a literary landmark.)
  • Sigal, Pierre-André. L’homme et le miracle dans la France médiévale (XIe–XIIe siècle). Paris: Cerf, 1985. (The later tradition of shrine miracle-collections in Gregory’s line.)