Tamar Rotman sets herself a challenge in Hagiography, Historiography, and Identity in Sixth-Century Gaul by intervening in the crowded literature on the writings of early medieval bishop Gregory of Tours. Best known for his ten-book Histories, Gregory also wrote a handful of works about saints and martyrs that have received only sporadic attention. What makes Rotman's book stand out is her insistence on treating his full hagiographical corpus as a coherent body of work—something heretofore ignored. Building on both hagiographical studies that have demonstrated the genre's utility for social history and historiographical scholarship treating Gregory and other early historians as creative actors who promoted specific agendas in their regional histories, Rotman argues that Gregory created a parallel ecclesiastical history through his hagiography. These works were not just about venerating saints, but also crafting a Christian identity rooted in Gaul and a place in wider Christian history for the Frankish church.
After an introduction that sets out this thesis, her aims, and the scholarly field, chapter 1 introduces Gregory and his authorial choices. Rotman shows how Gregory used his Virtutibus Sancti Martini, Virtutibus Sancti Juliani, and Vita Patrum to fortify his episcopal authority, just as he did with his Histories. Chapter 2 turns to the less-studied Glory of the Martyrs and Glory of the Confessors. Here Rotman highlights the presence of stories of foreign martyrs, many of whom were not venerated in Gaul. This oddity is what led her to question the common assumption that hagiographical works are first and foremost practical texts for immediate religious use, and to suspect that Gregory had a broader agenda in crafting his miracle collections in particular. This chapter primarily surveys the mentioned martyrs and speculates about how their stories may have reached Gregory, something Rotman admits we have limited evidence for. Chapter 3 then attempts to reconstruct Gregory's agenda through a close examination of the structure and content of the GM, GC, and VP. Rotman argues convincingly that, both chronologically and geographically, these three works taken together parallel the books of Gregory's Histories and that this must have been deliberate. Including eastern martyrs thus served the literary goal of setting the Frankish church and its martyrs within a longer Christian history. Chapter 4 explains the purpose of parallel hagiographical and historiographical narratives: crafting a specifically Gallo-Christian identity for the people of the Frankish kingdom. Building on a wealth of recent scholarship on identities in Merovingian Gaul, Rotman argues that Gregory wrote neither a national history nor a Christian one, but one that combined the two to foster belonging in a unique local community with a common Christian past and future. In the conclusion, Rotman summarizes her argument and reiterates the need to apply to hagiographical corpuses the advances in recent scholarship of seeing medieval historiography as a creative literary genre and analyzing it accordingly.
Sometimes the argument oversimplifies the complexity of religious identity in the sixth century. For example, would Gregory really have thought contemporary western and eastern Christians shared a common orthodoxy (152)? It is true that in comparison to Arian Christians in Spain, against whom Gregory draws a clear boundary marking Gallic Christians as correct, Eastern Mediterranean Christians were more theologically akin to Gregory's Roman Catholicism. However, the Three Chapters controversy was not very far in the past at the time Gregory was writing, and tensions over east–west differences must have at least remained in the collective memory—and this needs more unpacking. Similarly, how exact the parallels are between the books of Histories and the collective ecclesiastical history in GM, GC, and VP could be described in further detail.
As other reviewers have noted, parts of Rotman's argument rehash old ground, but that is inevitable with an author like Gregory of Tours about whom so much has been said. It must be recognized, too, that Rotman does not claim to be introducing a completely new framework for understanding Gregory, or hagiography, or historiography, but instead seeks to combine recent work on all these areas and apply it in new ways. It is in that combination of the full corpus of Gregory's hagiographical works with the type of analysis Helmut Reimitz, among others, has done on Gregory's historiography where Rotman's originality shines through. She is completely correct that scholars often relegate Gregory's hagiographical writings to an afterthought, or use one of those texts to speak for the whole. Rotman makes a good—and needed—argument for considering the whole corpus together and taking it as seriously as we do the Histories, both from a theoretical standpoint and in practice by demonstrating parallels. Experts on Gregory of Tours will nitpick some of her claims, but individual details that may not be completely accurate or need more discussion do not invalidate the broader picture she has clearly illuminated. Future scholars of Gregory of Tours will need to explain why they have chosen not to address his hagiographical corpus, not just assume it is irrelevant. In this way, Rotman's book opens the door to further developments in scholarship on Gregory and the role of hagiography in historical study.
