From the Diversity of History to a History of Diversity: the Example of Gregory of Tours

At the end of the sixth century, Bishop Gregory of Tours wrote the first comprehensive post-Roman history in the Frankish kingdom, which would become the most successful and enduring successor kingdom of the Western Roman empire. Consolidation and stability, however, are not Gregory's leitmotifs. He himself presented his narrative right from the start as mixte confusaeque - a topsy-turvy history of holy and unholy events, of saints and sinners, kings and bishops, Christians and pagans, of virtutes sanctorum et strages gentium.  Gregory's commitment to complexity has hardly been taken seriously by modern historiography. In fact, most modern historians have ignored this statement and developed approaches to reduce the complexity of his narrative either by regarding him as a historian of the Dark Ages (a naive historian overwhelmed by the task of writing a proper history), or by seeing him as a meta-textual demiurge - a cunning manipulator of a story that corresponded more to his rhetorical devices and spiritual agenda than to the social realities of his time. The critical work on Gregory's Histories, however, started much earlier: with the rewriting of the ten books as a Frankish history in the seventh and eighth centuries, as is visible in a (for the early medieval period) considerable number of extant manuscripts. In my talk I would like to concentrate on this line of reception of copyists and historians and how they built upon and adapted the complex social imaginary of the Merovingian bishop.