History of the Franks

I've just started Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks. I read excerpts from it for my class in Medieval Political Thought and wanted to come back to it when I had more time. It's more interesting to read primary sources to find out what the original authors had to say and so I've pulled out some primary source books on the Middle Ages as well as some Medieval literature from my personal library. I plan to roughly read them in chronological order.

I also plan to blog about what I read. By doing this, it will give me a chance to think and reflect on what I read. A lot of the time, when I am reading for pleasure and especially when something is thrilling, I tend to read "in the moment" and not do any close reading. I think if I blog about what I have just read, it will force me to think more deeply about it and get more out of my reading. It be nice to read the book with someone, but none of my Facebook friends seemed interested. I was hoping that at least one or two people would want to since I thought that they were interested in things medieval, but alas... no potentially fun discussion group for me and a blog will have to suffice.

I finished the Introduction today. From what I've gathered, Gregory of Tours came from a noble Gallo-Roman family which was involved in ecclesiastics. Some of his ancestors were even saints. His father died when he was young and he was turned over by his mother to one of his male clergyman relatives to rear. Under this guidance, received an education as an ecclesiastic and learned grammar and dialectic, two of the seven areas which made up the ideal medieval education. (The other subjects are rhetoric, geometry, astronomy, mathematics and music.) Within these two subjects, he mostly studied the Bible, such as the Gospels and Acts. He was made Bishop of Tours in 572 or 573 and finished writing The History of the Franks in the 590s. He died about three years later. Gregory is described as a modest and deprecating man and a likeable person in general.

His book starts with the beginning of the Bible and continues until he begins to write about contemporary events in Books V to X when he becomes the Bishop of Tours. He is not prone to gross exaggeration, so his narrative can be relied upon, although it is not without pardonable misinformation on his part. In Books I to V when he writes about events before his time, he cites many books, some of which are lost to us today. So, in addition to being a chronicler of the times, he has also unwittingly recorded for posterity the works which we would not otherwise have known of.

During my days as an undergraduate, while taking a really interesting class about John Wycliffe and thinking about biblical imagery in medieval stained glass, it dawned on me that it seems that the medieval people saw themselves as people of The Book. That is, they saw their history as just a continuation of biblical stories/history. If this is true, this would account for the reason why the crusades were as popular as they were and why they were fought as ferociously as they were. Biblical kings also justified and gave power to the idea of contemporary kings.