Among their topics are east and west from a Visigoth perspective: how and why Frankish brides were negotiated in the late sixth century, private records of official diplomacy: the Franco-Byzantine letters in the Austrasian Epistolar Collection, Mediterranean homesick blues: human trafficking in the Merovingian leges, the portrayal of Emperor Tiberius II in
Gregory of Tours, and when contemporary history is caught up by the immediate present: Fredegar's proleptic depiction of Emperor Constans II.
Well, he's now retired from University College, Dublin, but remains Emeritus Professor of Medieval History and continues work as a historian; his new book project concerns
Gregory of Tours.
Gregory of Tours told how Childeric was exiled by the Franks in Soissons for his lewd behaviour and had to hide at Thuringian king Basin's household.
Such intertwining continued in the days of
Gregory of Tours (538-594), the subject of chapter 5.
Spiritual Fluidity:
Gregory of Tours' Female Confessors.
Martin's shrine and reported by
Gregory of Tours, examines the role of physically violent divine action (vomiting, for example) as essential parts of cures.
Auerbach is able to get startling results from such unexpected works as
Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks, in which the sentences and points of view have shifted from the autocratic position of earlier imperial writers to an interest in "everything that can impress the people."
From Herodotus to Nathalie Zeman Davis, through the byways of Gibbon and
Gregory of Tours, Wells puts the historian in the spotlight.
We delight with him in the conversational, confiding tone of Herodotus's account of the wars between the Greeks and Persians, in recurrent patterns of providential intervention in Biblical history, in the newly universal history Polybius saw in the rise of Rome, in the vibrant and violent world of war berserks
Gregory of Tours conjures for us, in the thoroughly detailed political account Guicciardini gives of Italy's subjugation to foreign powers, and, of course, in the refreshing elegance and erudition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
In the 6th century AD,
Gregory of Tours, a Frankish bishop and historian, wanted no part of the astrology and astral religion of the ancients.
Bishop
Gregory of Tours mentioned one such leprosarium at Cabillonum, the modern Chalon-sur-Sa6ne.
After following Polycarp at Smyrna, he studied at Rome before becoming priest, then (178) bishop at Lyons where (
Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks 1.29) his preaching converted the population until "rivers of blood ran through the streets" during the Severan persecution and Irenaeus was tortured and martyred.