Course Description Francia in the Age of Clovis and Gregory of Tours

Course Description

Francia in the Age of Clovis and Gregory of Tours

‘“Hand over the murderess Fredegund” they said, “the woman who garrotted my aunt, the woman who killed first my father and then my uncle and who put my two cousins to the sword”.’ (Gregory,Histories, VII.7)

‘“The noble Fredegund excels in all virtues ... she carries the heavy weight of the cares of state, she cherishes you with her goodness, she helps you by her service.”’ (Venantius Fortunatus, Poems, IX.1)

This Special Subject is built around the fullest and most readable historical work of the early middle ages, the Histories of a Gallo-Roman bishop of Tours, Gregory. The bulk of the work is about the period when he was a bishop and thus a considerable political figure, and the structure is loose enough to find room for an almost endless series of anecdotes, told with immense verve. Gregory was keen to berate his contemporaries for their moral failings, his works provide remarkably detailed information on the habits and customs of his age. The set texts include some of Gregory’s saints’ lives and miracle stories, which are written with the same power as the Histories and show Saints and their relics intervening regularly in affairs on earth.

Other texts present a different view of events, which can be compared and contrasted to Gregory’s. The poems of Fortunatus paint a very rosy picture of Gallo-Roman bishops and Frankish monarchs; and Caesarius of Arles offers a rival ideal for the ordering of the Christian life, for him centred on monasteries and pastoral care. Two legal texts, the earliest Frankish law-code and the canons of the church, tell us much about both Frankish and Roman ways of making law and keeping peace. Finally, some important archaeological finds, including the richly furnished burial of a pagan king, allow the Franks to speak to us directly from their graves.

These texts provide a vivid and detailed picture of the Franks as they settled amongst a Gallo-Roman population with its own proud and ancient traditions. They provide an excellent insight into the mental and social world of the early middle ages, with its belief in the active intervention of God and his Saints on Earth and its bonds of fierce kin-loyalty and the power of vengeance. The texts are all set and examined in English, and there is an excellent body of English-language secondary reading, since Gregory of Tours is a prime area of current research in Britain and the U.S.A.

This Special Subject should obviously appeal to students who are already interested in the early middle ages; but it is also designed to be self-contained and attractive to people with little or no previous experience of the period.