Rivers of Risk and Redemption in Gregory of Tours’ Writings
2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/689460
ISSN2040-8072
Autores Tópico(s)Classical Antiquity Studies
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeRivers of Risk and Redemption in Gregory of Tours’ WritingsEllen F. ArnoldEllen F. Arnold Search for more articles by this author Ellen F. Arnold is Associate Professor of History at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, OH (e-mail: [email protected])PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn the fifth book of his History of the Franks, Gregory of Tours recounts a series of devastating river floods throughout southern Gaul: “In the fifth year of the reign of King Childebert [580], great floods filled the Auvergne, so much so that for twelve days the rains did not stop. The floodwaters were so great that they poured into the Limagne—so badly that many who had not yet sown their grain were unable to do so. The rivers Loire and Flavaris (which is called the Allier) and the other rushing rivers swelled up so much that they overran their banks to a point that had never before been exceeded.”1 The floods resulted in the loss of cattle, crops, and infrastructure, including damages to the city walls at Lyons. Gregory recounts these damaging floods as part of a narrative of omens and disaster. This flood was also reported by Marius of Avenches, who wrote, “in the month of October, in the territory of Vallensi, the Rhone flooded, so that a great amount of the harvest was ruined: and within Italy the rivers were so flooded that the farmers suffered great ruin.”2 According to Gregory, the year 580 also saw a possible meteorite fall near Tours, and an earthquake near Bordeaux accompanied by rockfalls and fires that had no other clear cause, so must have been “stirred up by God.” Orleans burnt down, and Bourges was “struck by hail.” This year of disaster was followed by disease—an epidemic of dysentery struck “all of Gaul.”3River floods play a similar starring role in HF 5.41, where Gregory again compiles a series of omens, this time datable to between 581 and 583. These portents included a wolf that entered the walls of Poitiers, a destructive wind, fiery skies, strange behavior by roosters, and flooding: “The Loire was higher than the year before, and the rushing waters reached all the way down to the confluence with the Cher. … The moon was darkened, and a comet appeared. A great plague amongst the people followed.”4 Though Michael McCormick et al. have demonstrated that Gregory’s reports of noteworthy seasonal floods throughout the 580s are reinforced by dendrochronological data, the historicity of these floods is not my primary concern. Instead, I am interested in understanding how these tales of river floods fit within Gregory of Tours’ environmental imagination—how he encouraged his readers to perceive the rivers of Gaul as part of a landscape full of routine risks—risks that could be mitigated through the actions of local communities and their bishops and that could be superseded by the direct intervention of Martin and the other saints of Gaul.Gregory of Tours (538–94) is by no means a neglected figure; both later medieval writers and modern scholars have depended heavily on his interpretations of early Francia, and the volume and quality of his writing make his voice one of the most resonant of early medieval historians and hagiographers. As Thomas Noble notes, Gregory is “simultaneously essential, intriguing, and maddening,”5 and almost all early medievalists have wrestled with the prolific bishop. This is not the place for a full survey of the many different aspects of Gregory and his world that have been explored by historians, Latinists, and religious scholars; such an effort would, in fact, require an article all its own.6 Instead, I would like to focus here on an aspect of Gregory’s writing that has thus far, surprisingly, been largely neglected: his representation and perception of the natural world and water.Fig. 1. Key rivers mentioned in the text.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointDespite Gregory’s prolific writing, his works remain largely untapped by medieval environmental historians, and his descriptions of the natural world largely overlooked by early medieval scholars. There are a few general exceptions to this broad lack of attention to Gregory’s descriptions of nature. The first is the scholars of disease and natural disaster who look to Gregory’s writing for descriptions and examples of these phenomena. For example, Tim Newfield and Peregrine Horden have discussed Gregory’s work as evidence for infectious diseases (both human and animal).7 Christian Rohr provides the most extensive example of this in an article that surveys Gregory’s descriptions of natural disasters. Rohr, who also points out the surprising lack of other work on Gregory’s reports of natural events, concludes that despite some stories from earlier in the History that link natural catastrophe with meaningful historical events, by the time he reaches his own era, Gregory’s descriptions of natural disasters become more fully and realistically described. Rohr believes Gregory to be not only a careful witness and reporter of such events, but also to have had an “unmistakable interest in natural events.”8There has also been work on Gregory’s De cursu stellarum, a treatise on astronomy, though it has received much less attention than one might expect. Stephen C. McCluskey’s work highlights the place that Gregory’s work has in the trajectory of ancient and medieval astronomical treatises and knowledge.9 Finally, another exception lies in two early works by the scholar of patristics Giselle de Nie that use Gregory’s History and his work on astronomy as springboards into discussions of the role of waters, trees, seeds, and extraordinary natural phenomena in Gregory’s writing. These two pieces provide a much more thorough assessment than I will of Gregory’s understandings of miracles, baptism, and spiritual redemption and the ways in which God used signs and prodigies as spiritual warnings.10 Yet de Nie’s articles flew largely under the radar of Gregory of Tours scholarship, in part, perhaps, because they were written in 1979 and 1985, when environmental history was in its infancy, and before medieval environmental history had emerged as a recognized field.11 And so it is time to revisit and build on these themes, with increased awareness of environmental history, ecocriticism, and the degree to which medieval people were engaged actors in their ecosystems.De Nie has just this year published a new edition and translation of Gregory’s miracle collections, making her one of the few scholars to more than nod to the rest of Gregory’s corpus.12 As Danuta Shanzer has observed, the miracles have long taken a back seat: “Time out of mind, his Histories have taken precedence. The reasons are clear. They are the Big Book that narrates the important historical and political events.”13 Shanzer traces the increased attention to the miracles since the publication of Peter Brown’s work and the translations by Edward James and Raymond van Dam, yet notes that (as is arguably true of much work with hagiography and with miracle stories in general), “Virtually everyone (and by this I really mean historians) taps into the Miracles vertically with little regard for pattern and continuity.”14All told, in spite of many scholarly projects on Gregory that pay attention to cities, cult centers, church infrastructure, and the ways that the urban and religious landscapes intersect, very, very little attention has been paid to the natural environment.15 Ian Wood’s careful reconstruction of the urban spaces of early medieval Tours, despite asking questions about the geography and relative location of Gallic cult centers, fails to discuss rivers (with the single exception of the Rhone, relevant only when it undermines church buildings in Vienne). His map of early medieval Tours even mislabels the Loire as the Rhone!16 An equally striking example of the absence of nature from works on Gregory is the 2002 collection The World of Gregory of Tours, which includes no essays explicitly devoted to agricultural or environmental history or about representations of nature.17 Nancy Gauthier’s essay on urban continuity and economic change does address the ways that Gregory’s work can be used to understand urban transformation, but she does not discuss rivers, despite Gregory’s clear decision to emphasize their importance. For example, just as “the River Ouche has a great wealth of fish,” Gregory’s description of the city of Dijon is full of the natural environment, particularly its fields, rivers, and waters. Gregory writes that in addition to the fish-filled Ouche, the city has “another small river (fluviolum) that comes from the north. Entering the city through a gate, passing under a bridge, it leaves the city again through another gate, flowing its gentle waves around all of the city’s defenses. Moreover, it turns watermills before the gate with a wondrous speed.”18 Yet when Gautier discusses the passage, she claims that it “emphasizes the walls,” paying no attention to the natural elements of the urban landscape that Gregory finds so central.19The centrality of rivers to Gregory’s environmental imagination is also suggested by the prominence that rivers and waters (real and allegorical) have in the structure and organization of the work. He opens the History with a description of paradise that quickly turns into a discussion of the water and blood of Christ’s Passion. Gregory links Christ’s sacrifice and the salvific waters that flow from his body to the rivers of paradise, which he names “the four-fold flowing river of the Lamb.”20 After recounting the Fall, Gregory moves briskly into accounts of the Flood (1.4) and the Red Sea (1.10). He ends book 1 with an account of Saint Martin’s body moving along the Vienne and the Loire and includes a discussion of Elisha’s rainmaking in the opening chapter of book 2. He then ends book 3 by recounting that “in that year there was a hard winter, harsher than normal, so much so that the ice froze the swift-flowing rivers solid, so that they offered to the people as solid a purchase as if they were earth.”21 Though in the middle of his work books begin and end with life events of powerful people, by the end he returns to using natural events as structural guides, noting rains and river flooding in 9.44. The penultimate chapter of the entire History ends with a discussion of the horrible weather of 591, which followed a series of disease outbreaks. An intense drought was then followed by animal murrains and a series of torrential rains: “The hay was destroyed on account of the downpours of rain and the swelling of the rivers, the grain failed, but the vines on the other hand were in abundance; acorns grew but were not harvested.”22The Rhine, Rhone, and Loire rivers appear throughout the work. Yet it is not only the dominant rivers that receive his attention, as he writes about the following rivers by name: Aisne, Allier, Cher, Clain, Dordogne, Garonne, Isère, Jordan, Main, Marne, Mayenne, Mosel, Nile, Orge, Ouche, Oust, Saȏne, Scheldt, Seine, Suzon, Tiber, Unstrut, Vienne, and the Woëvre.23 Though the Tiber, Nile, and Jordan belong to a discourse of sacral topography that extends beyond Gaul, the majority of these waters are Gallic. They course through the pages of the History as sites of battles, conduits of trade and travel, and as parts of an often hostile and dangerous natural world. They are crossed by armies, bishops, pilgrims, and fishermen, and their flooding, freezing, and flowing are a steady backdrop to the human events that Gregory narrates. So why are these rivers so apparently invisible to most modern historians?Surveys of medieval environmental history in turn pay hardly any attention to Gregory of Tours. In what is sure to become the field’s standard reference work, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe, Richard Hoffmann mentions Gregory only twice, and in John Aberth’s An Environmental History of the Middle Ages, Gregory and his works are completely absent.24 Perhaps because of his interest in pre-Christian cults, even André Guillerme only cites one passage from Gregory’s work in his study of water and urbanism in early medieval France.25 Though his work does appear in conversations about plague and disease history, and in McCormick’s work on trade and trade products, the only essays to seriously contend with Gregory in an environmental context have focused on the issue of natural disasters.26 Yet overall, Gregory has been neglected by environmental historians, in part (I suspect) because the History is viewed as largely dynastic and political. Moreover, works of hagiography have been largely ignored by medieval environmental historians, a point I have elaborated on elsewhere.27Turning our attention to the natural world of Gaul and to the rivers that were so vital to its history can deepen our understanding of the ways that lived experience influenced Gregory’s concepts of history, spirituality, and the meaning of the lives and deaths of the saints in early Gaul. It can also help us better understand medieval practical and cultural responses to environmental risk and hazard, as well as the complex ways that early medieval communities interacted with and responded to their environments.“I judge of things about which I know”: Experiencing the EnvironmentIn Gregory of Tours’ writing (historical, hagiographical, and scientific) we encounter an author who allows his individual experiences to share the page with collective memory and with previous literary and historical works. Though he occasionally tells tales set in far-off landscapes, much of Gregory’s writing focuses on the people and places that he most closely identified with. Helmut Reimitz, in discussing the History, notes that “from the beginning of the fifth book, he is not only reporting the events as the author of the narrative, but presents himself as the bishop of the prestigious church of Tours and one of the most influential figures of the kingdom. We may therefore assume that his literary Spielräume—his room/s for manoeuvre as an author—were related to his political and social experience.”28Gregory’s relatives appear throughout his writing, as do his own experiences and the towns, monasteries, and rivers that he knew most intimately. Danuta Shanzer has pointed out that in one of his earliest hagiographical attempts, the shrine-based Miracles of Saint Julian (VSJ), “Gregory sets the ball rolling with the autobiographical and epigraphic invention of Julian’s head in Vienne. In the centre of the work appear the walk-ons and cameos that reveal Gregory’s family’s cults of this saint.”29 She makes a similar assertion about the collective Life of the Fathers (VP), connecting his family’s religious devotion directly to the idea of Gaul as holy space: “The Fathers moves the Mediterranean desert to Gaul with feats of ascetics and bishops. But it also had the more private aim of commemorating members of Gregory’s own family.”30 Lewis Thorpe, a translator of the History, points out that the densest descriptions of both people and places occur in contexts that Gregory was familiar with. Thorpe notes that, while the descriptions of the urban and natural landscapes of Gaul can be rich and vibrant, “when we find ourselves in Barcelona or Bellinzona or Carthage there is ample opportunity for local colour on a large scale, but Gregory, who has never been out of Gaul himself, does not take it.”31Though lacking experience of the world outside Gaul, Gregory was well traveled within it. As a bishop, he traveled extensively not only in his own bishopric, but also throughout the kingdom as an attendee of church councils and political events. As Gregory Halfond points out in his discussion of the “traveling bishops” of the Merovingian era, episcopal obligations connected bishops directly to the landscapes, roads, and waterways of their territories. Furthermore, he notes that though “these bishops were men of wealth and stature” and traveled in relative comfort, they were not immune from the realities and discomfort of travel.32 Gregory had practical and firsthand knowledge of the rivers that he describes throughout his works, and as a reporter of lived events and of the natural world, he seems to have been quite accurate. There is, indeed, a passage in the History where Gregory describes a moment of direct observation of the northern lights (8.17). Gregory was in Carignan in the Ardennes and saw them on three consecutive nights, providing a colorful and dynamic description. De Nie suggests that this description “is again striking testimony of his intellectual honesty that he is capable of considering a partly natural explanation for phenomena which, as he confesses, had frightened him so much.”33In his astronomical treatise, De cursu stellarum ratio (CS), Gregory produced a star table intended to help determine when to have monastic services. He drew on Roman astronomical knowledge and on direct observation. In his discussion of the work, Stephen McCluskey argues that Gregory “was not merely repeating received astronomical material; his descriptions reflect the application of astronomical observations to the problem of regulating the time of prayer.” He adds that the monastery of Saint Martin’s “on the north bank of the Loire offers the unrestricted view of the horizon that Gregory’s astronomy presumes.”34 Halfond’s article on the significance of astronomical events across Gregory’s work echoes this point, as he asserts that “the bulk of portents recorded in the Historiae are ones that Gregory, in theory, would have been able to observe with his own eyes.”35Christian Rohr also argues that Gregory showed a wide knowledge of regular and irregular natural events. He notes that the star atlas in the CS seems to have been based “on his own very precise observations and not off of traditional patterns.”36 Furthermore, in examining Gregory’s description of a disastrous flash flood on the Rhone in 563, he characterizes the account as “exceptionally realistic” in its depiction of how such a flood and subsequent landslides would happen.37 Though it is unlikely that Gregory was himself at the disaster site, many of his other descriptions of rivers in flood and in more routine settings are probably based on his own experiences and personal knowledge.Gregory’s friend, the poet and hagiographer Venantius Fortunatus, gives us further evidence for the familiarity of local authors with rivers and river travel. In a poem on the superlative qualities (exaggerated!) of the Garonne, Fortunatus fends off rightful disbelief by claiming to be personally connected to the river: “I have crossed it; I judge of things about which I know.”38 In another instance, Fortunatus recalled his dangerous trip on the Mosel in a poem to his patrons, the abbess/queen Radegund and her daughter Agnes. This poem shows the energy and violence of river storms and is a reminder that though such eloquent voices rarely survive from the early Middle Ages, disasters on the river could befall anyone and could happen in an instant. Fortunatus writes: “I was then driven wearily by the waves and rain in a small craft through many a danger, where the fierce driving North wind had turned the river upside down and the water raised billows which curled threateningly; its banks were not holding the agitated floods; the waters poured forth and invaded fresh terrain.” If anything, his experience (and the flood) worsened. “As I was entrusted to the ragged roaring of the torrent here, the unfettered storm raged with terrifying blasts and the stern would rise up as the bow fell through the liquid peaks, climbing the watery paths as the mountain-mass shifted; when the boat was held atop a swirling eddy, the sailor occupied the clouds, and then, as the waters drew back, he returned to the fields.”39 Unsurprisingly, given this description, stormy, flooded waters and shipwrecks drew the attention of poets and hagiographers alike.Gregory, too, had been a near-shipwreck victim. Though an incident on the Garonne (discussed below) stands out, he was also at risk another time. While visiting the royal court at Koblenz, he was involved in a nighttime river crossing that was a near disaster. Gregory took care to note that the town and the castle there were named because “the streams of the Rhine and the Mosel, flowing equally, are joined together in that place.”40 After a late night at court, Gregory headed down to the river after dark and “hit upon the boat on the shore that had been prepared for him.” He got in, alongside “a great many other random people, but suddenly the boat was filled as much with water as with people.” He believed that the relics of Saint Martin that he carried with him protected him, and returning hastily to the shore, the boat “was drained of both people and the stream.”41As a bishop charged with the upkeep of the urban infrastructure and daily economy of Tours, riverine risk was part of Gregory’s routine concerns. Throughout his writing, he tended towards presenting navigation as unsafe and rivers as obstacles to economic and cultural stability. Yet as a hagiographer interested in explicating the relations between God, the saints, nature, and human behavior, he also sees the waters of Gaul as potentially salvific—rivers and springs protect the just, punish the wicked, and offer renewal to communities. He himself experienced just such a miracle, and this also influenced the way he understood the world around him. Though at first oppositional, when taken together such representations of the waters of Gaul as hazards and as potential paths to salvation reveal a medieval belief that God and the saints worked actively within the natural and supernatural worlds. Equally importantly, however, they remind us that everyday experiences and environments shaped stories about the divine, and that bishops, abbots, and other leaders were engaged not only with religious ideals but also with their communities’ material concerns and success.The Mosel—a River of Risk?The Mosel is present in much of Gregory’s writing, appearing as an active site of miracle and as part of the religious landscape of early Gaul. His stories of the Mosel reflect his connection to the everyday concerns of travelers up and down the rivers of Gaul, even when the stories focus on the supernatural and the miraculous. His Mosel is a river of risk. Miracles along the Mosel occur within a daily setting that emphasizes both the routine and extraordinary hazards associated with an economy and society that was dependent on riverine communications.Early medieval Gaul was crossed by (and dependent on) hundreds of major and minor rivers. Rivers were vital to trade, communications, and agricultural development. Boats plied their way routinely up and down rivers—in fact, because of smaller boats and the importance of local as well as regional travel, many more rivers were linked into the medieval navigation network than in modern times. With Gregory’s writing, we are afforded a fuller glimpse of routine river travel than exists again until the Carolingian era on the Continent and after the year 1000 in England.42 Premodern rivers were also sites of industry. Though it is routine to speak of early medieval rivers as “unregulated” when compared to today, there were in fact many ways in which rivers were altered and regulated to enhance their usefulness to the growing cities. Early medieval people built canals, constructed mills and millraces, dammed smaller rivers to create millponds and fishponds, and constructed temporary and permanent fishing infrastructure along shorelines.43 Bridges, roads, and ports transformed access along and across rivers and aided riverine navigation. By the 500s, in short, rivers were deeply enmeshed in the everyday experiences of most residents of Gaul and were of central importance to the everyday concerns of bishops of riverine towns.Yet we need to be cautious here; though a steady source of economic vitality, rivers were not stable. The canals, dams, weirs, and bridges that brought people into closer contact with rivers also altered the dynamics of the rivers, increasing the likelihood of disruptions to the system. Seasonal floods from snow melts and the normal erratic patterns of unregulated rivers meant that downstream flooding was commonplace. Though Carolingian-era annals do not include descriptions of floods from the Merovingian era, they do reveal something of the frequency with which large floods were experienced. In the ninth century alone, they report eighteen separate years with floods, heavy rains, and so forth; several of these years see multiple chronicles reporting the same flood, suggesting either the ways in which these chronicles built on and drew from one another or the ubiquity or geographic extent of those floods (or both). Sometimes, the claim for the extensiveness of flooding is made directly, such as in 834, when the Annals of Xanten report that “in that year, the whole earth was greatly flooded with water.” Yet more frequently, these descriptions seem to show very sober understandings of the scale and damages that could be caused by large-scale river floods. The Xanten annalist describes a flood in 864 “that extended through the Rhine’s channel as far as Xanten,” flooding the church and presumably damaging other infrastructure.44Yet most floods were damaging, but not catastrophic. Though we as moderns perceive floods as both irregular and dangerous because of our highly controlled riverscapes, this has not always been the case. As Petra Van Dam has pointed out, many premodern European communities were “amphibious”—adapting to the changing rivers and waterscapes that surrounded them.45 In an article on medieval risk, Christopher Gerrard and David Petley point out that “several traditional features of the medieval agrarian and household economy across Europe served to buffer risk, particularly from routine ‘slow-onset’ hazards such as harvest failures,” and, I would suggest, routine seasonal flooding.46 Even so, flooded rivers presented many problems for medieval communities, from the routine risks of interrupted travel, disrupted fisheries, and muddy fields to the more extreme hazards of washed-out crossings, damaged bridges, destroyed crops, and lost human and animal life.One of the reasons that Gregory’s depiction of the Mosel as a dangerous river is noteworthy is that other Gallic writers presented a very different view of the river. In the writings of many late-antique and early medieval writers, the Mosel is fertile and lush, a vital lifeline of Gallic economy, pride, and identity, on whose banks key cities and villas perched, and down whose course the traffic of empire flowed. The Mosel is not merely backdrop but the main stage in many late-antique and early medieval poems and stories. Perhaps the best known of these is Ausonius’s fourth century poem The Mosella, a 438-line poem ostensibly set up as a hymn of praise to the river, which Ausonius sees as the primary geographic feature of Gaul, important to shaping a new Gallic identity. Ausonius’s Mosel is complicated and rich, and representative of the many different things that rivers meant to early medieval people. It was “ship-bearing as the sea, with sloping waters gliding as a river, and with thy crystal depths the peer of lakes, brooks [it could] match for hurrying flow, cool springs surpass for limpid draughts.”47 Throughout the poem, Ausonius recognizes the Mosel as part of an extended riverscape that included not only the river but also the mountains, cities, fish, plants, animals, and people who lived in and alongside it. It is lushly imagined, full of the products of natural bounty, human ingenuity, sites of memory and belonging, work and play.Gregory’s friend Venantius Fortunatus saw a different river. Though he, too, had experienced near shipwreck and drowning, he was more tempted to see in the river and its human landscape the power of time and the beauty of ruins restored. On a voyage on the Mosel that he immortalized in verse, he noted that as he passed Trier “the very ruins give evidence of its power. We look round on all sides at the crags with their threatening heights, where the sharp rocks rise to pierce the clouds, where the rugged crags stretch up their lofty peaks, and the rock, rough with outcrops, rises to the stars. But not even here are the unyielding stones free to be without fruit; indeed the rocks are fruitful and flow with wine…. [P]atches cultivated by the farmers shine amidst the savage rocks.”48 Fortunatus again described the Mosel in a poem that used its beauty and bounty to praise a bishop of Metz. Though the river is in part stage and metaphor, it is also clearly appreciated and valued for its own sake: “With its dark stream the Moselle spreads forth its main, and the river softly rolls along its great water; it laps the banks, scented with the verdant sward, and the wave gently washes the grassy blades.”49Gregory’s Mosel, on the other hand, is never pastoral. Though its agricultural and economic context is similarly visible, that context is presented as it is disrupted and ruptured. The river is constantly fluctuating and changeable—unpredictable and disruptive. The river floods, storms strike, and boats are nearly sunk. In presenting the river as a site of risk to both personal and infrastructural safety, Gregory fits unremarkably into a hagiographic tradition of exploring the ways that saints protect against and are protected from the routine risks of daily life. For example, in his Miracles of Saint Martin (VSM) Gregory includes a story that is full of the everyday details of river trade and transit. A salt merchant from Trier was at Metz, and he docked his boat on the Mos
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