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Venantius Fortunatus: Panegyric in Merovingian Gaul

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Venantius Fortunatus: Panegyric in Merovingian Gaul CHAPTER NINE VENANTIUS FORTUNATUS: PANEGYRIC IN MEROVINGIAN GAUL Judith George (The Open University in Scotland) By the late sixth century, Gaul, once a Roman province, was ruled by the Merovingians. Culturally the Greeks had once taken their Roman captors captive; 1 now, in their turn, the Gallo-Romans had similarly prevailed over their conquerors. The literary and cultu­ ral traditions of the Gallo-Romans were eagerly assimilated by the Merovingians as a vital part of their inheritance as rulers of this country.2 The Italian poet, Venantius Fortunatus, thus found fertile ground for drawing upon his formal rhetorical training to take an active part as a panegyrist in Merovingian political life, and to develop the genre as a strong and relevant tool for communication and negotiation in the tangled and bloody strands of Merovingian state and ecclesiastical politics. Over thirty years or so of substantial output, we can see the poet developing in confidence and versatility as a panegyrist. His earliest poems, to the Merovingian king Sigibert and to his court officials and bishops (AD 566-8), were skilful compositions, deal­ ing diplomatically with personalities and issues, but mainly con­ cerned to establish the poet's position in influential circles of patronage. In the panegyric to King Charibert, delivered a year or so later, Fortunatus mediated firmly between the Church and the king; and from that point, he became established as a spokesman for the ex-queen Radegund in Poitiers,3 where he made his home, for his friend Gregory, Bishop of Tours,4 and for the interests of 1 Horace, Epistles 2.1.156 'Greece, captured, conquered her fierce captor and invaded rural Latium with the arts.' 2 See George 1992, 11-18; Wood 1994, 20-32; Riche 1976, 239-43. 3 For Radegund see George 1992, 30-1 n.155, 161-77; van Dam 1993, 30-40, 98-9; Wood 1994, 136-9. 4 For Gregory of Tours see George 1992, 124-31; James 1991, passim; van 226 JUDITH GEORGE their communities in the vicissitudes of feuding between the Merovingian kings. This considerable body of work allows us to see a poet, rooted by his education and early training in the mainstream classical tradition, working in the context of a markedly changing culture to develop and adapt the traditions of the past to fulfil what had always been the basic role of the panegyrist, that of political commentator and mediator. Over the years, his poems show an increasing sophistication in rising to the demands of specific and varied occasions, handling even dangerous issues sensitively and persuasively, drawing appropriately on a range of styles and reson­ ances, from the personal and informal to formal and imperial magnificence. Throughout, however, there is a steady and in­ creasingly firm and articulate standpoint on the duties of Church and king, and the nature of the relationship between them. The poet Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus was born in Dupla­ vis, near Treviso, probably around 540, and moved to Ravenna to receive a traditional classical education.5 Though past the heyday of Theoderic, Ravenna was still a place of power and magnifi­ cence. 6 The rich ceremonial and the visual splendour of this setting, encapsulated in the mosaics of San Vitale, with which Fortunatus would have been familiar,7 would have ensured that the poet's rhetorical training was one of practical experience, not merely an exercise in book learning. But as well as his traditional education as a Roman rhetorician, which enabled him to offer the desirable commodity of Romanitas ('Roman-ness') to his Merovingian patrons, he records that the Church had a powerful influence on his early education;8 a pil­ grimage to give thanks to St Martin was one of his reasons for com­ ing to Gaul, and he probably arrived with letters of introduction Dam 1992 and 1993, passim. 5 See Brennan 1985a; George 1992, 22-34; Godman 1987, 1-37. 6 See George 1992, 21 n.101. 7 For possible Ravennan influence see Brennan 1985a, 53; George 1992, 43. 8 Venantius Fortunatus, Vita Martini 4.658-62. .
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