Death and Afterlife in the Pages of Gregory of Tours by Allen E. Jones

Abstract

Reviewed by: Death and Afterlife in the Pages of Gregory of Tours by Allen E. Jones Raymond Van Dam Death and Afterlife in the Pages of Gregory of Tours Allen E. Jones Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. Pp. 324. ISBN: 978-9-462-98804-0 Gregory of Tours has become synonymous with sixth-century Gaul. For topics as disparate as Frankish kingship and the cult of the saints, his writings are consistently the foundational sources. Modern scholarship has fashioned early Merovingian Gaul in Gregory's image. In this book Allen E. Jones has deployed Gregory's writings a bit differently. Rather than excavate his books for information about various political, religious, and social topics, Jones has focused resolutely on a subject that can be overlooked: Gregory himself. Many studies have of course examined Gregory as a historiographer, a bishop, and a patron of saints' cults. In contrast, Jones is interested in the making of Gregory, the process of how he became a cleric, a [End Page 312] historian, a promoter of the cults of St. Martin and St. Julian, and, most of all, a theologian and a pastor. This is a book about growing up, adapting to events, developing ideas, and turning critical moments into career opportunities and longstanding perspectives. Jones suggests that ideas about death and the afterlife were a central theme in Gregory's theology, and in the first three chapters he argues that Gregory developed his beliefs from "successive encounters with influential individuals" (16). The most important influences on the young Gregory were "his saint-obsessed family members" (28). His own name recalled his great-grandfather, Bishop Gregory of Langres, who had died at about the time of his namesake's birth. Gregory subsequently considered Gregory of Langres a saint who performed miracles at his tomb. Gregory's father and an uncle introduced him to the cult of St. Julian at Brioude; his mother repeatedly demonstrated how "to ascribe positive outcomes of rather routine occurences to saintly protection" (43). After Gregory recovered from a severe illness at the shrine of St. Martin in Tours, he became a deacon. During the next decade he was able to learn how to negotiate ecclesiastical factionalism from the bishops in his family, such as Nicetius of Lyon. After Gregory emerged as bishop at Tours in 573, his mother visited and encouraged him to record the miracles of St. Martin. "Becoming Gregory" (36, 66) had required the crucible of his family. Gregory's extended family was more like an extensive network, with several bishops as nodes and many links among important cities in central Gaul. One strength of Jones' analysis is the emphasis on the progressive development of Gregory's ideas about death and the afterlife; another is embedding the process within this familial network. His account is essentially a very detailed intellectual biography of Gregory. At the same time one participant in this network is distinctively odd. In Jones' discussion not only did Gregory have to cope with the deaths of relatives and the threat of death from his own illnesses. In addition, he had to confront death as a personified agent known as "Death." In Jones's perspective Death had an active role in the making of Gregory. Jones stresses "the leading role Death played in impacting the boy's life-altering decisions" (34); "Death too had a part to play in bringing Gregory to Tours" (87). In fact, Jones credits Death with influencing Gregory to become both a historian and a hagiographer. After Death created the episcopal vacancy at Tours (100), Gregory initiated his collections of miracle stories. At the same time his see was at the center of the civil war between Merovingian kings during the mid-570s. "Death assuredly basked in the gore of 576" (98). Jones argues that "Death's rampage over the Touraine" (104) convinced Gregory to compose a historical narrative that would "convey a poignantly near-contemporary pastoral and soteriological message to his audience" (111). An "underlying moral tenor" (141) was the foundation for all of his writings. In the final two chapters Jones examines how Gregory interpreted the many deaths in his stories about kings and saints. The Afterlife has replaced...