The Age of Monks and Empires · c. 480-620 · Gaul
Merovingian Gallic Christianity
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About This Movement
When the Frankish king Clovis accepted baptism as a Nicene Christian around the turn of the sixth century, he brought his people into the same church as the Gallo-Roman bishops rather than into the Homoian one most other barbarian kings held. And the Gaul that resulted is one of the few places in this era where ordinary parish religion can actually be overheard. Caesarius, bishop of Arles, preached short, blunt, repeatable sermons at people who came to church and also consulted soothsayers, kept the old feast days, and slipped out before the sermon. Gregory of Tours, writing two generations later, filled book after book with the shrines, relics and cures that structured everyday devotion, alongside a famously unsparing narrative of Frankish kings murdering one another. Queens became founders — Radegund walked out of a royal marriage to establish a convent at Poitiers — and poets wrote hymns for their relics. It is a Christianity that is fully established and only half converted at the same time, and it says both things about itself out loud.
Sources
- Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks (trans. Lewis Thorpe, 1974) (primary) — The era's great narrative of kings, bishops and shrines from inside Gaul; cheap Penguin Classics translation; standard Latin edition MGH SRM I.1.
- Gregory of Tours, miracle books - Glory of the Martyrs, Glory of the Confessors, Life of the Fathers (trans. Raymond Van Dam / Edward James, TTH, 1985-91) (primary) — The shrine-world of relics, healings, and ordinary pilgrims; all in affordable Liverpool TTH English translations.
- Caesarius of Arles, Sermons (trans. M. M. Mueller, FOTC 31/47/66, 3 vols, 1956-73) (primary) — Preaching to half-pagan congregations c.500-542 - rural superstition, almsgiving, basic catechesis; complete English translation in Fathers of the Church.
- William E. Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles: The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul (1994) (secondary) — Standard modern study of how a bishop actually tried to Christianize ordinary society; Cambridge UP.
- Yitzhak Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481-751 (1995) (secondary) — Counterweight reading: argues Merovingian lay culture was more Christianized than Caesarius's complaints suggest; Brill.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 2, ch. 1, 'Western Christianities' (Winrich Lohr) (reference) — Reference chapter covering the Latin West, including Gaul, up to about 600.