Hagiography, Historiography, and Identity in Sixth-Century Gaul: Rethinking Gregory of Tours by Tamar Rotman (review)

Reviewed by: Hagiography, Historiography, and Identity in Sixth-Century Gaul: Rethinking Gregory of Tours by Tamar Rotman Richard Shaw Hagiography, Historiography, and Identity in Sixth-Century Gaul: Rethinking Gregory of Tours Tamar Rotman Social Worlds of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Pp. 195. ISBN: 978-9463727730. This book by Tamar Rotman, based on her doctoral dissertation, puts forward three hypotheses: Gregory of Tours' Glory of the Martyrs (GM) as well as his [End Page 565] Glory of the Confessors (GC) covered "eastern" saints for whom there were no contemporary cults in Gaul (Chapter 2); the GM, GC, and the Life of the Fathers (VP) were planned as an "ecclesiastical history" to serve as a counterpart to the "secular history" offered in the Ten Books of Histories (LH) (Chapter 3); and this "ecclesiastical history" was intended to establish a sense of "Gallo-Christian identity" (Chapter 4). It is easier to pose stimulating questions about Gregory and his works than it is to provide persuasive answers. Gregory is an enigma, and his corpus is sufficiently large and varied as to defy simplistic explanation. Rotman raises—and incidentally inspires—many interesting questions about Gregory of Tours's approach—and about how he should be approached—but the arguments made—and the ways the arguments are made—in this slim volume are unlikely to convince many. The argument proper begins in Chapter 2, following what amounts to two introductions: the "Introduction," which introduces Gregory and begins setting out the aims of the study via intense criticism (running throughout the book) of the perceived limitations of the work of all previous scholars in the field; and Chapter 1, which (re)introduces Gregory, providing an effective tour of elements of his life, as well as a synopsis of some, but not all, of his hagiographical writings. Chapter 2 ("'When the Saints Go Marching In': Eastern Saints in Merovingian Gaul") attempts to show that Gregory included accounts of saints, especially from the east and especially in the GM, that were not venerated in Gaul. The method followed is to test an assumption that is said to be the consensus among scholars: that Gregory only wrote about and to promote saints for whom there was a local cult (47). There is no such academic consensus, as far as the present reviewer is aware. Disposing of this straw man, therefore, restricts one to conclusions that are already generally accepted: "Therefore, one must break free from traditional definitions of hagiography and accept the idea that hagiographical texts such as Gregory's collections may have been written for other reasons than merely commemorating the saints and promoting their cults." (104). Does any scholar doubt this? Despite the uncontroversial nature of the chapter's principal finding—that Gregory wrote stories about saints for whom there was no local cult in Gaul—the argument employed is unpersuasive. Rotman's process is to discuss each account of "eastern" saints (although she does also consider "Italian" but not "Spanish" or other non-Gallic saints) in the GM and the GC, and to examine whether there are signs of veneration of that saint in Gaul. There is useful content here, and Rotman helpfully tracks some earlier accounts of these individuals. As a method of argument, however, this approach relies on treating absence of evidence as evidence of absence. In reality—and this should not really need saying, especially to those studying this period—the lack of evidence for veneration of a saint is not evidence that the saint was not venerated, just as it would be fallacious to assert that evidence for veneration proved that the existence of these cults was the reason for Gregory's inclusion of stories about the saints in question. The premise for the analysis in Chapter 2 is the assumption that "Gregory's choice [to include foreign saints, especially in the GM] … strikes one as peculiar, meriting further discussion" (47). [End Page 566] She decries prior historians for having "overlooked" (47) this issue. One simple explanation for this putative oversight is that much of the answer is surely obvious: East and West remained well connected, even integrated, in the sixth century. People...