In modern historical scholarship Pope Gregory I (590–604) has often been presented simultaneously as the last Roman of Rome, the final scion of classical Rome's great aristocratic families, and the first medieval pope—in short, the linchpin of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.Footnote 1 In the historiographical imagination, the letania septiformis, a seven-fold procession first organized in 590 by Gregory in the face of plague and ruin (and performed only one further time in 603), once served as the very moment when antiquity died and the medieval period was born—though most accounts now render the procession as a pious omen auguring an ostensibly epochal pontificate. Many of his Roman contemporaries, however, particularly those in the papal curia, had a different opinion of the pope who would eventually be called “the Great.”Footnote 2 The brief life of Gregory in the Liber Pontificalis (LP), a serial biography of the bishops of Rome written by the papal chancellery, signaled Gregory's unpopularity in typical, oblique bureaucratese: it focused on institutional prestige and praised successors who aided the clergy to ensure that readers would understand proper papal behavior, while studiously avoiding outright condemnation and ignoring the procession that would eventually be considered momentous.
How then did the letania septiformis come to be considered as the very funeral procession of antiquity or—less portentously—as the auspicious introduction to Gregory's pontificate? In part, the answer lies in the inventive re-descriptions of the letania septiformis as an element in the re-fashioning of the memory of Gregory.Footnote 3 This “rewriting and adaptation” allowed the processional narrative to “remain in use and meaningful to readers,” maintaining the memory and the relevance of the letania septiformis and so also Gregory.Footnote 4 That is, over the course of centuries, the re-descriptions of the letania septiformis re-invented tradition in order to respond to new situations by reference to the past.Footnote 5 However, “that it may be suitably reinvented to fit the occasion might better be understood as a sign of vitality rather than of decadence”—(re)invention does not stipulate inauthenticity.Footnote 6
A contemporary source attests to each of the two iterations of the procession in which seven different groups gathered at seven different churches that were widely distributed throughout the city, before marching to a common destination, S. Maria Maggiore: one, a lurid passage in the Historiarum libri decem (Ten Books of Histories) of Gregory of Tours (538/9–594) conjures the 590 procession in apocalyptic tones that seem to have spurred subsequent memorialization; and two, a sermon of Gregory I conserved among his papal letters preserves the procession announcement from 603. No author—not even Gregory's early afficiandos, John Moschus (ca. 550–634)—the first to call Gregory great in Greek, Isidore of Seville (570–636), Bede (673–735), or the anonymous author of the Whitby vita Gregorii (ca. 700–750)—mentions the procession again until Paul the Deacon (ca. 720–799) in the second half of the eighth century. No text from Rome describes the letania until the vita Gregorii of John the Deacon (died by 882) in the late-ninth century. Like an eddy in “the stream of tradition,” the letania septiformis remained for centuries an unexploited resource in Roman cultural memory until it was re-discovered by Paul the Deacon and John the Deacon.Footnote 7 In conjunction with the apocalyptic narrative frame in the account by the bishop of Tours, both authors offered descriptions that altered and elided details of the procession. On the one hand, Paul condensed the seven-fold procession into a portrait of Gregory as an icon of monastic virtue. On the other hand, seemingly in response to Paul's restricted, monastic vision, John purportedly scoured the papal archives, sifting through Gregory's letters and homilies where he found the sermon from 603 which he used to develop a competing version of Gregory as a more broadly and classically conceived Christian leader.
Once freed from the constraints of its original context, this procession was free to develop in myriad ways. In ninth- and tenth-century liturgical texts, organizational details of the letania septiformis would be conflated with those of the letania maior—a distinct and separate annual procession from S. Lorenzo in Lucina in the campus Martius to St. Peter's performed throughout the Middle Ages, which was possibly also instituted by Gregory I—creating a hybrid procession, which served as a symbol of Gregory's and thereby the church of Rome's liturgical acumen. The imaginative literary descriptions and the amalgamated liturgical accounts culminated in the Legenda aurea in which a brave Gregory marched through the city in order to convince the archangel Michael to sheath his sword and to end the plague, even as Romans fell dead in the streets. In short, the letania septiformis was re-crafted through a series of inventive descriptions which increasingly divorced it from its original setting, inflecting it by means of other rituals and legends and amplifying its import and impact—an emphasis that has affected modern scholarship.
I. The letania septiformis in 590 and 603
According to Gregory of Tours, on a Sunday morning in 590 quite possibly during Lent, Gregory I, though not yet confirmed as bishop by the emperor, preached a sermon, calling the citizens of Rome to repentance and reflection in the face of ruinous floods and a devastating plague.Footnote 8 At the end of his homily, Gregory directed his audience to gather at dawn on Wednesday in order to perform a letania septiformis—a procession in which the (Christian) citizens of Rome were divided into seven distinct groups which would meet at seven separate churches before each made their way to a common destination, the church now known as S. Maria Maggiore:
Therefore, let the clergy go forth from the church of the holy martyrs Cosmas and Damian with the priests of the sixth region; all the abbots, indeed, with their monks from the church of the holy martyrs Gervasius and Protasius with the priests of the fourth region. Let all the abbesses with their congregations go forth from the church of the holy martyrs Marcellinus and Peter with the priests of the first region; all the children from the church of the holy martyrs John and Paul with the priests of the second region; moreover, all the laymen from the church of the holy protomartyr Stephen with the priests of the seventh region; all the widows from the church of holy Euphemia with the priests of the fifth region. However, let all the married women go from the church of the holy martyr Clement with the priests of the third region: so that all departing from these individual churches with prayers and tears may assemble at the basilica of the blessed Mary, ever Virgin, Mother of our Lord God Jesus Christ; so that there, supplicating the Lord for a long time with weeping and groaning, we may be worthy to merit pardon for our sins.Footnote 9
Avoiding the low-lying areas of Rome, the seven different groups wound their way from a set of churches located above flood levels—situated in a rough arc from the Caelian hill in the southwest to the Quirinal hill in the west-northwest—to their destination on the Esquiline.
Thirteen years later in 603, Gregory preached substantially the same penitential homily and again organized a seven-fold procession by which he hoped to secure God's mercy. At the end of the sermon, however, Gregory called for his audience to gather at first light the very next morning. Then, following an injunction to avoid any work, absent from the sermon in the Ten Books of Histories, the processional regulations were given:
Let the litany of the clergy go out from the church of John the Baptist, the litany of men from the church of the martyr saint Marcellus, the litany of the monks from the church of the blessed martyrs John and Paul, the litany of the nuns from the church of the blessed martyrs Cosmas and Damian, the litany of married women from the church of the blessed first martyr Stephen, the litany of the widows from the church of the blessed martyr Vitalis and the litany of the poor and infants from the church of the blessed martyr Cecilia.
Given at the basilica of Saint Sabina on the fourth day of the Kalends of September in the sixth indiction [August 29, 603].Footnote 10
This iteration of the letania septiformis comes directly from Gregory himself as the sermon and processional directions were preserved in the Hadrianic collection of the registrum epistularum Gregorii (Gregory's correspondence). The occasion for this procession must remain a matter of speculation, but it seems that flooding may be ruled out as S. Cecilia across the Tiber river was available as was S. Marcellus on the eastern edge of the flood-prone Campus Martius. There are other, relatively minor differences. In the 590-performance, the poor were not a separate category, while the call for the 603-procession eliminated the distribution of presbyters among all the assemblies. The declining prominence of the clergy from 590 to 603 may well index Gregory's elevation of monks and the corresponding devaluation of priests. Additionally, the letania septiformis of 603 took place the very next day, instead of after three days of prayer and penance.Footnote 11 Otherwise, both processions were similarly organized: four churches, including the final destination S. Maria Maggiore, and many of the same groups featured in both: clergy, monks, nuns, married women, widows, laymen, and children.Footnote 12 Also, in both cases seven individual cortèges—comprising eight different categories by which the procession was organized—formed one unified procession. Equally, both renditions of the letania septiformis were notable acts of pastoral care, though, as this simple sketch suggests, not yet epochal ones.
II. The Roman Memory of Gregory I
Despite such a seemingly compelling and compassionate launch, Gregory's pontificate garnered him few supporters in the curial establishment, a situation that endured throughout his reign.Footnote 13 Specifically, Gregory's monastic vocation threatened both the hard won position of the early papal bureaucrats and the prominence of Rome in the Mediterranean world, based in part on the very papal institutions created by curial clerics. Then only a few months after the second iteration in 603, Gregory himself died on March 12, 604. The recently deceased bishop was first buried in the atrium of St. Peter's basilica in front of the secretarium. The inscription of the funeral epitaph has largely disappeared, though numerous syllogae record its contents, which have been characterized as quietly original, a commemoration that was neither wholly formulaic nor entirely personal.Footnote 14
At Rome, apart from the epitaph, only a rather brief entry in the clerical LP remarked upon the life of Gregory I, omitting mention of the letaniae even though it was written under a sympathetic successor, pope Honorius (625–638). In fact, the LP very selectively memorialized Gregory I—highlighting his literary output, the mission to the English, a minor liturgical adjustment, his patronage of Roman churches (though credited with the construction of only a single edifice, S. Agata dei Goti), and his ordinations, which were typical institutional concerns—with little to suggest Gregory's eventual, retrospective prominence.Footnote 15 As Alan Thacker has noted, “Unlike most early medieval saints, whose cults were local and focused around their tombs, in the century and a half after his death Pope Gregory the Great was venerated less in Rome, where he was born, died, and was buried, than in the distant province of England.”Footnote 16 While commemorated and even venerated elsewhere—first in Spain where his works were already collected by the end of the sixth century and then in France, Ireland, and especially England where a flourishing cult developed by the early-eighth century—the Roman remembrance of Gregory was decidedly lackluster until the ninth century.Footnote 17 In stark contrast to his later legacy, neither Gregory nor the letania septiformis was particularly well received by his Roman clerical colleagues. However, none of the early non-Roman, pro-Gregory texts mentioned the ostensibly revolutionary letania septiformis either—apart from Gregory of Tours.
At Rome, Gregory was known as a teacher and author whose emphasis on monastic and ascetic virtues did not win universal acclaim. John the Deacon in his late-ninth-century vita Gregorii dramatized the anti-Gregorian backlash with an emblematic story in which the Romans wanted to burn Gregory's books in order to obliterate his memory.Footnote 18 In particular, his monastic values conflicted, it seems, with the institutionalized habits of the papal curia. The papal clergy had developed into a rather unyielding institution whose perks and privileges its members were loath to relinquish. For example, in 594 Gregory wrote to the bishop of Ravenna to protest the illegitimate clerical occupation of monastic churches. While scolding the Ravennate bishop, Gregory's opinion of certain clerics emerged all too clearly: “For I cannot endure in any way the sacred places being destroyed through the vanity of clerics.”Footnote 19 In addition, Gregory's attempts to place monks and ascetics in positions of authority disrupted the status quo of the clergy, damaging its pride in office. Finally, the Roman clergy may have been concerned for Rome's place in Christendom. The papal bureaucracy and its clerical methods had helped make Rome a powerful Christian capital. Gregory, for all of his Roman patriotism, may have threatened this position by undermining the papal institution and its independence with ascetic and even apocalyptic ideals and by tying the fortunes of Rome too closely to the Byzantine emperor.Footnote 20
In fact, the clerical values of the papal administration asserted themselves quite pointedly in the vita of Sabinian (604–606), Gregory's successor who supposedly “filled the church with clerics.”Footnote 21 Apparently, the memory of Sabinian served as a vehicle for clerical revenge, for which reason, perhaps, the Whitby vita Gregorii depicts an unnamed successor, probably Sabinian, as jealous of Gregory and penurious with the church's store of wheat on account of which a spirited but defunct Gregory “kicked the man in the head. His successor died within a few days from the pain of the blow.”Footnote 22 Several subsequent LP vitae also highlight clerical concerns. For example, Boniface III (607) obtained recognition of the Roman church as head of all churches from the Byzantine emperor Phocas.Footnote 23 Deusdedit (615–618) “greatly loved the clergy; he restored the sacerdotes and clergy to their original places.”Footnote 24 “For his funeral, [Boniface V (619–625)] left an entire stipend to all the clergy”—as did Severinus (640), who “loved the clergy and increased the bounty for them all,” followed by John IV (640–642), Agatho (678–681), John V (685–686), and Conon (686–687).Footnote 25 Likewise, “on Easter Day this holy man [Benedict II (684–685)] honoured the clergy of various ranks with preferments.”Footnote 26 Even Honorius, despite his monastic sentiments and Gregorian predilections, was praised for his support of the clergy: “In his time he did much good. He educated the clergy.”Footnote 27
Nonetheless, the mid-seventh-century Notitia ecclesiarum urbis Romae (a so-called “pilgrim guide” possibly composed under Honorius) seemingly illustrates Honorius' Gregorian sympathies—as well as those of visitors to Rome—when it guides pilgrims to the “bed of the holy father Gregory.”Footnote 28 A few ensuing popes also favored Gregorian, ascetic ideals. Boniface IV (608-615), like Gregory, “made his own house into a monastery and enriched it.”Footnote 29 Adeodatus (672–676) grew up in a monastery in the middle of the seventh century, which he later enlarged.Footnote 30 Such sentiments notwithstanding, the papal, clerical establishment ensured that posterity would view its popes favorably by means of the LP vitae, a powerful instrument of institutional memory that consistently praised popes who buttressed the position of the clergy.Footnote 31
Gregory's reputation at Rome began to wax in the late-seventh century when pope Vitalian (657–672) sent Gregorian and other Roman relics to King Oswiu of Northumbria.Footnote 32 As early as the late-seventh century, a mass for Gregory was introduced into the so-called Gregorian Sacramentary, possibly by pope Sergius (687–701), as part of a wider elaboration of papal public ceremonial, which was most impressively evidenced by the Sergian Ordo romanus primus (ca. 700) which outlined a spectacular papal, stational liturgy.Footnote 33 However, the mass for Gregory first appeared only in the Hadrianum, the redaction of the Roman sacramentary that pope Hadrian (772–797) sent to Charlemagne in the late-eighth century. Charlemagne had requested a pure sacramentary of Gregory I—though such a composition was seemingly first attributed to Gregory only in the mid-eighth century by Egbert of York. Pope Hadrian obliged the king of the Franks by sending the most authentic sacramentary available, whose title emphasized its Gregorian authenticity—“This sacramentary . . . was published by Saint Gregory, the Roman pope. It was written in a room of the library from an authentic book”—intimating that the sacramentary may have only become “Gregorian” at this moment.Footnote 34 That is, although some of the contents of the “Gregorian” sacramentary may have been penned by Gregory, it seems to have been considered truly Gregorian only by the late-eighth century.
In the mid-eighth century, Gregory III (731–741), whose name along with that of his immediate predecessor Gregory II (715–731) might signal a rising tide of Gregorian sympathies, is thought to have erected an altar to S. Gregorii ad ianuas at S. Paul's outside the walls.Footnote 35 Yet, the cult of Gregory I at Rome truly blossomed only in the ninth century as Roman veneration finally caught up to Gregorian devotion elsewhere. At the very beginning of the ninth century, Leo III (795–816) provided “a white all-silk cloth with gold-studded panels and a cross” to cover Gregory's tomb.Footnote 36 Leo also “coated St. Gregory the confessor and pontiff's altar with fine silver-gilt weighing overall 127 lb.”Footnote 37 Nearly thirty years later, in 828–829, another Gregorian namesake, Gregory IV (828–844), translated the remains of his eponymous predecessor:
As he was inflamed with the fire of divine love he took the body of St. Gregory, the prelate of this universal church through whom the grace of the Holy Ghost had imparted a gift of unquenchable wisdom to all the earth, from the place where it had formerly been buried, and brought it not far from there to another place newly constructed within St. Peter the apostle's church, and he decorated his silver altar on all sides with silver panels, dedicated an oratory to his holy name and depicted his apse above with gilded mosaic.Footnote 38
To burnish his work, Gregory IV also translated other martyr relics to this oratory and then provided silk veils and a gold-studded cloth for the new tomb.
Finally, in the first Roman vita Gregorii (873–876), John the Deacon recounted the simple nighttime vigil performed to celebrate Gregory I during which Gregorian use-relics would be displayed.Footnote 39 At this point, John the Deacon appears to have been the first Latin author to characterize Gregory as magnus—great.Footnote 40 Though Gregory I would eventually be venerated as a saint in his hometown, the process was slow and stuttering, stretching from his death in 604 to the late-ninth century, when even canon law compilations came to include some of Gregory's letters.Footnote 41 The process by which the letania septiformis was elaborated was equally slow and stuttering from its first performance in 590 to the ninth century, after which point the re-imagination of the letania really gained momentum.
III. Afterlives of the letania septiformis
The letania septiformis would eventually be broadly disseminated both directly and indirectly and fundamentally re-described in order to play its (later) role as the providential inauguration of Gregory's pontificate, the fulcrum of a historical age.Footnote 42 The processional directions were directly diffused in the registrum epistularum of Gregory I. More specifically, the announcement of the sevenfold procession with instructions from 603 was inserted into the blank space between the fifth and sixth indictions in the collection of Gregory's letters compiled under pope Hadrian—perhaps another attempt, in addition to the Hadrianum, to exploit the increasingly powerful legacy of Gregory.Footnote 43 As Conrad Leyser puts it, Gregory's register “illustrates precisely the power of cultural memory.”Footnote 44 The 603-announcement did not circulate with earlier Gregorian letter collections, including one possibly assembled by Paul the Deacon himself.Footnote 45 If Paul really did compile this collection, then the letania announcement was likely preserved elsewhere in the archives at that time, as Paul depended entirely on the version penned by the bishop of Tours, wholly unaware, it seems, of the sermon-instructions that would eventually be conserved among Gregory's letters.
In the first half of the ninth century, Amalarius of Metz, in his work on the Roman liturgy and ecclesiastical offices, accurately reproduced the register version—omitting only the place where and time when the homily was given—that he had found inserted in a volume of Gregory's letters, perhaps the Hadrianic florilegium of Gregory's registrum. At the same time, however, Amalarius presented the letania septiformis as a species of letania maior, instituted in this case by Gregory himself in the face of Lombard depredations, an early conflation of the two processions.Footnote 46 In the late-ninth century, John the Deacon claimed that in order to write his vita Gregorii he scoured the papal archives, where among other Gregorian texts he supposedly found the original proclamation from 603. Finally, the register-announcement of the letania septiformis seems to have also circulated more or less on its own beginning in the ninth century. For example, an early-ninth-century Ordo romanus preserves a copy.Footnote 47
The homily that preceded the processional call was itself transmitted along with Gregory's gospel homilies in more than thirty manuscripts, the earliest example from Spain dating to the seventh or eighth century. In this case, the sermon was copied from Gregory of Tours, whose edition varies slightly from the register version, though without the processional instructions, despite the fact that the procession was indicated in the speech itself.Footnote 48 Much as the register version enjoyed independent circulation, so too did the sermon from Gregory of Tours experience a limited afterlife of its own. Nonetheless, without the processional instructions, the sermon circulating with the gospel homilies was just a fine oration with no part in the direct transmission of the letania septiformis.
The indirect or narrative transmission of the description of the letania septiformis was far more influential until the ninth century. Gregory of Tours, most likely, penned his vivid description of the procession, the earliest report of a letania septiformis, at the end of the sixth century.Footnote 49 Owen Chadwick and then Adriaan Breukelaar argue that the description is a later interpolation—perhaps added by the deacon Agiulf sometime shortly after the death of the bishop of Tours, as only the deacon was sufficiently close to Gregory of Tours and adequately knowledgeable about Rome.Footnote 50 The interpolation hypothesis has not, however, found many supporters.Footnote 51 Whatever the case, whether interpolated or not, the letania septiformis formed part of Gregory of Tours's work from a very early stage.Footnote 52
More importantly, this passage served as one of the first steps in the sanctification of the letania, as the bishop of Tours framed the procession with a harrowing account of devastation and disease: an account that was a short distance, if any, from hagiography.Footnote 53 In fact, this tale of misery and woe in Gregory of Tour's emplotment of the letania septiformis would become central to most subsequent re-descriptions of the procession, even when the pope's own text, without the dramatic staging, was available.
According to the disputed passage in the Ten Books of Histories:
In the fifteenth year of King Childebert [590 CE], our deacon [Agiulf], coming from the city of Rome with relics of the saints, related that in the previous year, in the ninth month [November 589], the Tiber river covered Rome with such a flood that ancient temples collapsed and the granaries of the church were ruined, in which several thousand bushels of wheat were lost. Even a multitude of serpents swam down the course of the river to the sea, among them a great dragon large as a tree trunk, but these beasts were drowned in the salt waves of the wild sea and cast up on shore. In its tracks, devastation followed, which they call the plague of the groin. Coming in the middle of the eleventh month [January 590], it immediately struck Pope Pelagius first of all, because it is written in the prophet Ezekiel: “And begin at My sanctuary,” [Ezekiel 9.6] and destroyed him without delay. After his death, great destruction of the people was caused on account of this disease. But because the Church of God could not remain without a leader, the whole people chose the deacon Gregory.Footnote 54
This apocalyptic moment called for dramatic action. Even though not yet imperially sanctioned as the bishop of Rome, Gregory quickly instituted a penitential procession by which the anger of God would be pacified, the performance of which was equally marked by calamity:
And so, at the third hour all the choirs came to church chanting psalms and crying out the Kyrie eleison through the avenues of the city. Our deacon, who was present, affirmed that in the space of a single hour, while the people produced sounds of supplication to the Lord, eighty persons fell to the ground and died. But the bishop-elect never stopped exhorting the people not to cease their prayers.Footnote 55
The image of Gregory leading his flock through the streets of Rome, urging the people to persist in prayer even as many of them fell dead, would eventually represent the letania septiformis tout court, even as this very passage by Gregory of Tours would serve as the foundation of many subsequent re-descriptions.
This foundation, however, was not wholly solid. Gregory of Tours recorded that the procession took place only after three days of prayer, which may indicate that Gregory of Tours or his deacon confused the seven-fold litany with the Gallic rogation processions, which did in fact take place over three days.Footnote 56 More importantly, the procession would not have been so compelling or so consequential without the apocalyptic narrative frame. The flood and its subsequent disease assuredly devastated the city, but, nonetheless, the portentous omens and the biblical citations amplified (and explained) the actual devastation. The flood and plague took on catastrophic, indeed epic proportions seemingly heralding the end of the world.Footnote 57 So Gregory succored his flock by determined repentance in the face of cataclysm. In short, the first literary description of the letania septiformis was also the first instance in which the specific details of the procession as it would have been performed at Rome—not to mention the actual situation of the city—were seemingly altered to suit the narrative needs of the author.
In fact, the very next re-description of the letania by Paul the Deacon makes plain this imaginative freedom.Footnote 58 Given the relative unpopularity of Gregory among the Lateran clergy, the lack of a Roman vita Gregorii might cause no surprise. But, until the mid- to late-eighth century when Paul composed his vita Gregorii, possibly at Monte Cassino, there was no Italian vita.Footnote 59 In this idealized portrait of Gregory, which he wrote to construct and to celebrate a certain image of Christian, even monastic, leadership, a description of the letania septiformis looms large, occupying over one-tenth of the text. Using Gregory of Tours freely, Paul dwelt on the circumstances of the flood, the coming of the plague, and the death of Pelagius. After detailing the unanimous election of Gregory by all the plebs, Paul recounted Gregory's sermon that urged the people to penance: “Therefore, dear brothers, with contrite hearts and works of penance, let us come to the tears of a letania septiformis with devout disposition at dawn of the fourth day so that the strict judge, when he considers the punishment for our faults, may spare us from the sentence of the proposed condemnation.”Footnote 60 Then, at the conclusion of the homily, Paul very briefly described the participants of the letania. On the appointed day, “a great multitude of priests and monks and others of diverse sex and age” marched through the city with Gregory, who never ceased to preach and to exhort the crowds, even though eighty men died in the space of an hour.Footnote 61 Paul thus borrowed the apocalyptic portrayal of Gregory of Tours in order to highlight the indefatigable pastoral leadership of a pious pope who remained a monk at heart in the face of overwhelming devastation.Footnote 62
In this case, however, Paul did not maintain the seven-fold processional organization. Despite his dependence upon Gregory of Tours, Paul took the opportunity to re-imagine the processional participants. Instead of the long litany of eight social groups into which the procession was originally organized, Paul offered a starkly abbreviated and extremely revealing description, which not only lumped together most of the groups that had participated but omitted the gathering places as well. As a deacon and a monk himself, Paul was seemingly only concerned with priests and monks: no one else really mattered.Footnote 63 The other categories by which the procession was organized were simply dismissed en masse. What is more, by leaving out so many details, including the itineraries, Paul robbed the procession of its original specificity, which, I contend, greatly facilitated its subsequent transformation by later medieval authors. Importantly, Paul's abbreviated portrait gained a wide audience in the extremely popular interpolated version of his vita Gregorii—the product of an unknown editor working sometime before 844, who interpolated Paul's text with one similar to the miracle-laden Whitby vita—which left the truncated letania untouched.Footnote 64
A few years later, in his History of the Lombards, a Christian interpretation of the Lombard past which also re-imagined Lombard-Carolingian relations, Paul again returned to the letania septiformis.Footnote 65 In this passage, just after the worst flood since Noah, converting Gregory into a hero of biblical proportions, Paul offered a more amplified description of the organization of the seven-fold litany.
He ordained that a letania septiformis should be offered, but while they were imploring God, eighty of them within the space of one hour fell suddenly to the earth and gave up the ghost. The letania septiformis was so called because all the people of the city were divided by the blessed Gregory into seven parts to intercede with the Lord. In the first troop indeed was all the clergy; in the second, all the abbots with their monks; in the third, all the abbesses with their companies; in the fourth, all the children; in the fifth, all the laymen; in the sixth, all the widows; in the seventh, all the married women. And we omit to say anything more concerning the blessed Gregory because some years ago with the help of God we composed his life in which, according to our slender ability, we sketched in writing what was to be told.Footnote 66
In this text, again following Gregory of Tours, Paul listed each of the groups into which the people of the city were divided with the exception of the regional presbyters who had accompanied each cortège. But even here, the specific details concerning where each group met and their final destination were omitted. Paul did refer the reader to his vita Gregorii, meaning the two texts were meant to be read together.Footnote 67 However, even together much information was ignored most especially concerning the itineraries. Although Paul emphasized real life action, constructing an image of Gregory from his practical pastoral activity unlike the miracle-laden Whitby vita, his truncated and doubled description dissassociated the letania septiformis from its social and urban contexts, which set the stage for the reimagination of the procession.Footnote 68
Approximately seventy-five years after the death of Paul the Deacon, John the Deacon wrote the first vita of Gregory at Rome between 873 and 876. Ostensibly, this vita sought to remedy centuries of Roman silence concerning Gregory and to provide a proper life to be read on his feast day.Footnote 69 At the same time, with the help of Anastasius Bibliothecarius, John articulated an image of Rome that was at once classical and Christian. In John's vita replete with references to the senatus populusque Romanus (SPQR)—“the Senate and Roman people,” long a popular shorthand for Rome—Gregory emerges as a liturgical reformer who had “fit together into a one volume book the Gelasian codex concerning the solemnities of masses,” an idealization possibly based on the so-called Gregorian sacramentary.Footnote 70 By using the vita of Paul as well as, possibly, the Lateran archive, John constructed an ideal Christian leader—a paragon of all churchly virtues who would restore classical order in Christian Rome.Footnote 71
More concretely, the vita might have served to buttress John VIII's papal authority as well as a more expansive image of Rome's grandeur. Indeed, John's Gregory could have served in a number of contexts: constructing Roman authority in opposition to the Byzantine empire; articulating a vision of a Roman, not a Frankish, empire; and serving polemically during the Formosan conflict—a disputed papal election in which John VIII was elected instead of an overly ambitious Formosus. The Formosan schism itself may have formed part of an ongoing struggle over the control of the memory of both Saint Benedict and Gregory. Formosus appears to have gained the support of Monte Cassino founded by Saint Benedict, where Paul may have written his vita. This support in turn may have spurred John the Deacon to write a vita to counter Paul's version. In the end, one may not be able to elucidate the specific political conditions in which John wrote or the specific stimuli that spurred him. Nonetheless, his vita Gregorii betrays notable contrasts with that of Paul specifically concerning the letania septiformis, which suggests that John contested the monastic image of Gregory's memory. Ultimately, the Roman John the Deacon appears to have won this battle as his life of Gregory became standard by the twelfth century, despite its length and demands upon the reader.Footnote 72
Unlike Paul who relied exclusively on Gregory of Tours, John claimed to have turned to the papal archive grounding his portrayal directly on the words of Gregory, himself, eschewing any mediation, perhaps an act of memory one-upmanship. In fact, John relied almost exclusively on the Hadrianic anthology of the registrum epistularum for Gregory's letters, from which, it would seem, he quoted the entire 603 proclamation, including both the sermon and processional organization.Footnote 73 In John's account, while the plague raged, a reluctant Gregory, elevated to the bishop's throne by the Roman clergy, Senate and people (clerus, senatus populusque Romanus), took up his pastoral duties, preached a stirring sermon of repentance, and then called the populace to a procession.Footnote 74
Let the litany of the clergy leave from the church of the holy John the Baptist; the litany of men from the church of the holy martyr Marcellus; the litany of monks from the church of the holy martyrs John and Paul; the litany of nuns from the church of the blessed martyrs Cosmas and Damian; the litany of married women from the church of the blessed first martyr Stephen; the litany of widows from the church of the martyr Vitale; the litany of the poor and the children from the church of the blessed Cecilia, a martyr.Footnote 75
Authorized by his archival research, John filled in some of the gaps left by Paul, whose apocalyptic frame John nonetheless maintained. In this case, John added the churches at which the seven groups first gathered according to the organizational scheme outlined in the register version. This overstated return to the archive may well have lent greater authority to John's text. As Jacques Derrida commented, “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.”Footnote 76 Certainly, John's supposed research created a sense of historical precision, which has been much appreciated by modern scholars.Footnote 77 Remarkably, though, despite this conscientious research, John still omitted the common destination of the seven groups. And, most interestingly, even though he replaced Gregory of Tours' and Paul's 590-version with the 603-register version, John still placed his procession in 590.Footnote 78 Seemingly, a need to counter Paul's monastic memory led him to ignore the register version's chronological indication. Even a re-description potentially based on the Lateran archive itself could conspicuously deviate from the original.
Indeed, directly on the heels of this passage, John summarily sketched the procession in terms that clearly imitate but also contradict the abbreviated depiction in Paul: “Therefore, then, a great multitude of every age, sex, and profession came on the appointed day to beseech the Lord according to the injunction of the priest Gregory.”Footnote 79 While Paul limited himself to priests and monks, John expanded Paul's monastic Rome to encompass non-clerical professions (along with the rest of Rome's citizens, a shorthand common to both). Even as John contested Paul's restricted vision and despite his archival authority, this abridged précis functions much as did Paul's: it de-contextualized the procession and compressed its organizational complexity. John might have sought to outshine Paul or even Paul's interpolator, but in the end the result is much the same. From Gregory of Tours to John the Deacon, the letania septiformis was continually re-written in order to buttress different images of Gregory—whether apocalyptic preacher, monastic icon, or renovator of a classical and Christian Rome—according to the context and needs of the author in question. In each case, the actual procession proved malleable, an event to be re-shaped as the memory of Gregory and his pontificate was re-imagined.
After these historical and biographical texts (and especially after the work of John the Deacon), liturgical and legendary texts had a role to play in the re-fashioning of the memory of letania septiformis. In the liturgical re-invention, the letania maior (the major litany), an entirely distinct procession, and letania septiformis eventually merged. In the mid-ninth century, Amalarius, as noted, reproduced the register-announcement of the letania septiformis as a type of letania maior. This liturgical confusion would only intensify.Footnote 80 In the mid-tenth century, a liturgical manual now titled Ordo Romanus L (OR L) noted that Gregory I instituted the major litany (letania maior) on April 25 as a seven-fold procession in which the participants were arranged according to the organizational scheme of the letania septiformis of 603. In addition, the liturgical order stipulated that the participants should not ride on horseback or wear ornate attire—rather they should don hairshirts and cover themselves in ashes.Footnote 81 As a generic liturgical manual, OR L did not specify the destination of the letania septiformis/maior—an omission which the extended itinerary of the letania maior would fill by the thirteenth century if not sooner.
According to Gregory I, himself, the late-sixth-century letania maior consisted of a procession from S. Lorenzo in Lucina to St Peter's, whose participants supplicated the Lord with hymns and spiritual chants—no seven-fold categorization provided, no itinerary or date given, no hairshirts or ashes required.Footnote 82 Sometime during the course of the seventh century, the major litany would eventually take place annually on April 25 and its itinerary would expand greatly: starting from S. Lorenzo in Lucina, exiting the city through the Porta Flaminia to the north, continuing to the Milvian Bridge, before making its way south again to St. Peter's.Footnote 83 However, the late-eighth-century Hadrianum, the version of the Gregorian sacramentary that outlined this itinerary, did not spell out the participants. It was only concerned with prayers and their locations, not people. Thus, by the tenth century there was, on the one hand, a liturgical manual (OR L) arranging the participants in the letania maior on the model of the letania septiformis and, on the other, a sacramentary that sketched only the itinerary of the letania maior that terminated at St. Peter's. In due course, the two would fuse, resulting in a procession (known as the major litany) organized like a letania septiformis but following the timing and itinerary of the letania maior.
One final detail remains. In the first half of the thirteenth century, Bartholomew of Trent recounted a number of apparitions of the archangel Michael. During the letania maior instituted in the face of the plague—as the letania septiformis and letania maior have completely merged by this point—Gregory saw the archangel atop of the turrets of Hadrian's mausoleum sheath his sword, signaling that Gregory's prayer had been heard. For that reason, Gregory then constructed a church in the mausoleum, which in turn christened the tomb as the Castle of Saint Angel, folding the monumental sepulcher into a Christian vision of Rome.Footnote 84 With this legend, all of the elements of the medieval image of the procession are in place: Gregory, Paul, and John provided a dramatic literary frame; liturgical texts contributed a wholly invented itinerary; and Bartholomew of Trent added the archangel Michael. In all of these disparate versions and portrayals, only Gregory construed as an ideal and idealized Christian bishop remained constant.
Finally, Jacobus de Voragine put all the pieces together in his wildly popular Legenda aurea (written ca. 1270) in an account that explicitly depended on both Paul the Deacon, and so also Gregory of Tours, and John the Deacon.Footnote 85 At the beginning of his version, Jacobus rapidly delineated the broad context, flood and plague, in response to which Gregory instituted a procession—though not seemingly the letania septiformis.
When [Gregory] had [yet] to be consecrated and the plague was devastating the people, he preached to the people, in organizing a procession he instituted litanies, and he exhorted everyone to pray zealously to the Lord. Even while the entire populace pleaded with God, however, the plague disseminated itself so that in one hour eighty men died; but Gregory did not at all cease to admonish the people not to desist from prayer until divine mercy should banish the plague.Footnote 86
After this first procession, Gregory attempted to flee Rome to avoid assuming the throne of Peter. A reluctant and so worthy Gregory was eventually discovered and consecrated pontiff much to his dissatisfaction. After lamenting the burden, Gregory turned his attention back to matters at hand.
The plague was still ravaging Rome, and Gregory ordained the procession with litanies through the circuit of the city in the accustomed way during a certain Easter season. An image of Blessed Mary ever Virgin—the one at Rome, so they say, was painted by Saint Luke, who was not only a physician, but a distinguished painter, and that it was a perfect likeness of the Virgin—carried at the head of the procession. And behold! The entire infection and turbulence of the air yielded to the image as if fleeing from it and being unable to withstand its presence: behind the image there remained a wonderful serenity and purity in the air. We are also told that the voices of angels were heard around the image, singing
To which the blessed Gregory promptly added:
Then Gregory saw an angel of the lord standing atop the castle of Crescentius, wiping a bloody sword and sheathing it. Gregory understood that the plague had ceased, as, indeed, happened. Following from which the castle was called the Castle of the Angel.Footnote 87
Jacobus split the 590-performance of the letania septiformis into two processions. The first procession was a failure, heavily inflected by apocalyptic elements ultimately derived from Gregory of Tours. In the highly elaborate and exaggerated second procession held sometime in proximity to Easter (perhaps April 25 on which day the letania maior was traditionally performed), the actual letania septiformis was distorted beyond recognition. Most likely Gregory had marched with the clergy departing from Ss. Cosmas and Damian in 590 and from the Lateran in 603. In the Golden Legend, however, Gregory made a circuit of the entire city processing by the mausoleum of Hadrian or the Castle of Crescentius (subsequently Castle of the Angel) seemingly on his way to St. Peter's. More impressively, even though undifferentiated marchers chanted the litanies, Gregory alone, bearing a Lukan icon of the Virgin Mary—an icon which miraculously filtered the air, cleansing the city of the plague, a feat expressed by the angel sheathing his bloody sword—came to represent all of the various groups of people mourning and marching through the city: at that moment Gregory was Rome.Footnote 88
Shortly after the Legenda aurea was written, images of Gregory marching at the head of a letania septiformis/maior were painted, all highlighting the climatic moment in which the angel sheathed his sword.Footnote 89 Such imagery would become especially popular after the cycles of bubonic plague in the fourteenth century. To offer one notable example: Les Très Riches Heures de Jean, Duc de Berry by the Limbourg brothers depicts a long procession exiting the walls of Rome. Gregory with his arms stretched to the sky implores the heavens for relief, as monks, priests, and nuns fall dead all around him.Footnote 90 This poignant image reveals nothing about the historical Gregory, whose Lateran colleagues seemingly did not appreciate his monastic habit, but does indicate a great deal about the subsequent re-inventions of the letania septiformis.
Later in the Legenda aurea, Jacobus returned again to the processio septiformis (seven-fold procession) in a disquisition on the Greater and Lesser Litanies.
The first [Greater] litany has been known in three ways: first, the Greater Litany [letania maior]; second, it is called the Septiform Procession [processio septiformis]; and third, it is called Black Crosses. It is called the Greater Litany for three reasons: first, for the one who instituted it, namely, Gregory the Great pope of the city of Rome; second, the place where it was instituted, namely, Rome, mistress and head of the world because of the body of the prince of the apostles and of the apostolic see; and third, the occasion of its institution, which was a great and widespread disease . . . The Greater Litany is called the Septiform Procession because Saint Gregory arranged the processions according to seven orders or classes. In the first order was the clergy; second, all the monks and religious men; third, the women religious; fourth, all the children; fifth, all the laymen; sixth, all the widows and unmarried women; and seventh, married women.Footnote 91
In his description of the procession that ended the plague, Jacobus lumped all the marchers together. By contrast, in this outline, he proffered the organizational scheme from the 590-version as reported by Gregory of Tours as amended by Paul, and so without the distribution of presbyters, but with the addition of unmarried women to the group of widows. Here, Jacobus simply identified the letaniae septiformis with the letania maior, even as he also changed the original procession, yet again.
In these several versions, the letania septiformis was dismembered and dispersed into three distinct descriptions. Some of the most prominent features of the original processional regulations have been largely occluded—for example, every hint of the topographical organization of the starting churches disappeared, for which reason the procession was called septiform in the first place; while the distribution of the inhabitants of Rome into different categories only appeared in an entry entirely separate from the actual performance of the plague procession and was presented as only one etiology among three possibilities. In each depiction in the Legenda, Gregory was the core as once again the letania septiformis played a role the representation of episcopal and papal power.Footnote 92
IV. The letania septiformis in Modern Scholarship
In the late-nineteenth century, Ferdinand Gregorovius, who initiated the modern scholarly study of this procession, fashioned the letania septiformis of 590 into the precise moment when ancient Rome died and medieval Rome was born:
The whole population thus joined in penitential procession, and while they marched among the ruins of the deserted city, and made the air re-echo with their solemn chants, they seemed to bear the phantom of ancient Rome herself to the grave, and to inaugurate the dreary centuries which were now to follow. The procession of 590 may in truth be regarded as the beginning of Rome's Middle Ages.Footnote 93
With muted masses falling dead in the streets, Gregory persevered leading a procession to St. Peter's to entreat God's mercy. En route, as Gregory continually encouraged the flagging efforts of the decimated crowds, the archangel Michael alighted upon Hadrian's mausoleum and sheathed a flaming sword to signal the end of the plague—which christened the mausoleum as the Castle of the Angel, a symbol of the end of classical Rome and the conversion of the city. Though compelling, this description fuses details from the bishop of Tours and the register-version. Gregorovius provides the date (August 29) and location (S. Sabina) from the register-version, but follows the group divisions of Gregory of Tours. In addition, Gregorovius ignored the destination indicated in both, St. Maria Maggiore. Instead, Gregorovius followed the itinerary of the Legenda aurea and embellished his portrayal with the archangel legend, which he contends was an ancient tradition that pre-dated the tenth century, though it first appeared in texts from the twelfth- or thirteenth-century.Footnote 94
Beginning with Thomas Hodgkin, English language scholarship has often employed a similarly dramatic rendering of this procession as an omen both auguring an overwhelmingly successful epispopacy and foreshadowing Gregory's eventual place in the historical imagination. Hodgkin, however, restricted his depiction of the letania of 590 to the account from Gregory of Tours, noting but declining to authenticate the later tradition according to which the procession took place on April 25—a date based on interference from the letania maior. Even so, Hodgkin could not resist the “beautiful legend . . . [that] the imagination of much later ages coupled . . . with this solemn act of intercession,” explicitly following Gregorovius's treatment of the later legend concerning the archangel Michael.Footnote 95
In his overwhelmingly influential biography, Frederick Homes Dudden offered his own poetic evocation of the procession. A mournful procession took place in “the dim twilight of the spring morning” of April 25, according to seventh-century tradition:
Pale-faced, emaciated, and clad in deepest mourning, the people moved slowly through the desolate streets towards the great basilica on the Esquiline. As the seven trains of priests and mourners wound through the city scarcely a sound was heard save the tramp of feet, and sobs and cries for mercy, and over all the doleful chant of the Kyrie Eleison, deepening in fervor as one person after another dropped plague-stricken from the ranks. For Death kept step with the moving crowds . . . Thus at length the Church of the Mother of God was reached, and here again Gregory addressed to the people an earnest exhortation to prayer and penitence, promising that if they would have faith the pestilence should cease.Footnote 96
Dudden then continued with the archangel Michael legend, whose supposed footprint relics were once kept in S. Maria Aracoeli, and added the poignant image of Gregory with the Lukan icon of the Virgin listening to the Regina coeli laetare echo from above. Although the archangel and the Lukan icon are acknowledged as later and invented traditions, the repeated amplification and embellishment of the original procession, often narrated in sentimental language by the historians themselves, nearly transports it from history to myth.
In other late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century biographies, the letania septiformis figured as an essential element in the transition from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. For example, Hartmann Grisar distinguished firmly between the account by the bishop of Tours and the register-version, but divided the participants according sex, age, and condition, an image which seems to come from John the Deacon. Similarly, Grisar could not resist the later legends, which he considered historically unfounded, to conjure up a touching image of barefoot participants covered in ashes moving slowly through the city hushed by sepulchral silence—the very picture of papal piety.Footnote 97 Not every subsequent history or biography pursued the path forged by Gregorovius. Pierre Batiffol, for one, remained close to the text of Gregory of Tours, focusing on the procession of 590, leaving aside both the register-homily and later legends.Footnote 98
More recent descriptions of the procession have also been more circumspect concerning the later legendary accretions—even so, the image of the procession from Les Très Riches Heures de Jean, Duc de Berry graces the cover of a recent companion to Gregory the Great, a visual summary of his legacy.Footnote 99 That is to say, the letania septiformis remains a favored moment, often recounted in biographies especially. Perhaps no longer the very tipping point from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, but still a decisive demonstration of Gregory's pastoral care: a “moving and spectacular demonstration of faith” with a devastated and ghostly Rome filled by the chanting of Kyrie eleison; a real and symbolic re-figuration the city, which would be conflated with another procession and amplified by legends.Footnote 100 Other recent biographies maintain the traditional date of April 25 from the seventh century, embroider their accounts with the archangel Michael legend, or even tender novel embellishments.Footnote 101 While, at times, liturgical and historical analyses of the letania seem to confound the letania septiformis with the letania maior.Footnote 102
That is, over the years, a handful of issues marks descriptions of this procession: one, a confusion of Gregory of Tours and the register-homily; two, a rather eloquent mytho-poetic emphasis on the later legends; and three, a conflation of the letania septiformis with the letania maior. It must be noted, though, that these very issues consistently reappear in historical scholarship in part because medieval sources present a truly tangled history of the letania septiformis. In general, the letania septiformis no longer serves as the inauguration of medieval Rome, but rather as the pious prologue to and as a symbol of the pontificate of Gregory I “the Great.” Notwithstanding its (only) relative demotion, the letania septiformis remains for many scholars an ecclesiastically organized world marching through the city, claiming Rome for the church in the very moment of its performance.Footnote 103 It still features prominently in accounts of the city of Rome under Gregory.Footnote 104 Gregory's contemporaries in the Lateran curia, who both ignored the procession and under-appreciated its organizer, might have been quite surprised that the procession would eventually come to symbolize such a pivotal moment in the pontificate of Gregory and in the history of Rome, if not also in the history of Europe.
V. Conclusion
Over the long centuries, portrayals of the letania septiformis became icons of Gregory's leadership—symbols both of his pastoral care and of the transformation of the city of Rome. Indeed, poignant descriptions of this procession remain a staple of scholarly literature on Gregory. However, neither Gregory himself nor this seven-fold procession was much appreciated by his Roman clerical contemporaries. For centuries, Roman sources kept silent concerning the procession and so the memory of the letania septiformis either persisted outside Rome in the work of Gregory of Tours or languished in the Lateran archives. Processions by nature are ephemeral constructions of civic life that impact urban consciousness only to the extent that they are remembered. So the letania could not transform Rome, or the memory of Rome, until it returned to Rome from the outside or was “rediscovered” in the archives.
Gregory of Tours inaugurated this process even before Gregory I had died—or perhaps shortly thereafter if the passage was interpolated—by framing the letania septiformis with apocalyptic devastation and conflating, perhaps, the seven-fold litany with the Gallic rogation processions. Over a century and a half later, Paul the Deacon pared the passage from Gregory of Tours into a condensed depiction of the letania septiformis as a monastic image of Rome. In the late-ninth century, John the Deacon contested that monastic image. To support his vision, John supposedly turned to the Lateran archives where he found the 603 iteration, which an anonymous member of the curial staff had conserved in a gap in between indictions in the Hadrianic compilation of Gregory's letters. Though he cited the 603 proclamation in full, John also offered an abbreviated summary of the procession—one which comprised the city in more generalized terms—and confused its chronology by placing the 603 version in 590. Following the literary transformations of the letania, several medieval liturgical scholars and transmitters (or creators) of legends also contributed to the re-writing of the letania—the final, most extended form of which the Legenda aurea presented at length and in multiple versions. As the original letania septiformis lost its historical foundation, it seems to have gained greater imaginative power. Indeed Hodgkin sagely noted, “In later days Pope Benedict XIV fixed the legend for ever in memories of all pilgrims to Rome, by erecting that statue of St. Michael which has now stood for a century and a half on the summit of ‘Castle of Sant’ Angelo.'”Footnote 105
During his lifetime and immediately afterwards, Gregory's Roman contemporaries did not consider him the sort who could or would become the linchpin of Antiquity and the Middle Ages as a much later historiographical imagination would have it. He was only constructed as such in an extended retrospective process, which began already in medieval sources stretching from Gregory of Tours to Jacobus de Voragine and beyond. In many of these sources, the letania was also re-imagined and embellished, so that it evolved into the pivot of Gregory's pontificate, if not also of an entire historical era. That is, the figure of Gregory the Great, and the letania septiformis that he instituted, became a core feature of the “imagined community” of Latin Christendom.Footnote 106 If the memory of Gregory played a role in the invention of the Middle Ages, the prominence of the letania septiformis in that remembrance was equally inventive.
