Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul.

HAYWARD, PAUL ANTONY

Yitzak Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481-751, Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions: Medieval and Early Modern Peoples 1 (Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1995), xiv + 308 pp. ISBN 90-041-0347-3. $100.50.

This book is an attempt to demonstrate that Merovingian Gaul, which is here distinguished from north-eastern Austrasia and the Frankish territories beyond the Rhine, was completely `Christian': not only was `secularity' not an option, but paganism was confined to the utmost margins of society from within a generation of the arrival of the Franks. Many will think this an unwise project, given how large and diverse a region Gaul was, how lacunose is the coverage offered by the historical record, and how difficult it is to demonstrate belief and understanding. In an attempt to circumvent these problems, Hen focuses upon Christianity's ritual practices, which he defines as its lowest common denominator as distinct from its intellectual content. He then sets about accumulating evidence that the vast majority of the population organized their lives around the rituals of the Church: that, for example, the annual calendar was governed by `temporal' and `sanctoral cycles' of the kind prescribed in the surviving mass-books (sacramentaries) of the Gallican Church.

This might seem like a plausible approach, but it is pursued with only minimal respect for how little is really known about how the liturgy was applied in practice. This much is well illustrated by Hen's attempts to reconstruct the `sanctoral cycles' of five different `locations' in Gaul. He attempts, for example, to infer the sanctoral cycle of Chelles from the contents of the nuns' relic collection, but it is problematic to assume that churches celebrated the feasts of saints of whom they possessed minor relics. Whenever, as sometimes happens in later centuries, both a relic list and a liturgical calendar survive for the same church the list almost always includes the relics of many saints whose feasts do not appear in the liturgical calendar. Hen envisages, furthermore, that all the churches and religious communities in a given city (sixth-century Arles or seventh-century Auxerre, for example) observed the same sanctoral cycle, a very doubtful assumption indeed given that cults were often vehicles for the expression of rivalries between local churches. It is not until the Carolingian period that evidence begins to emerge of bishops such as Theodulf of Orleans (d. 818) attempting, often unsuccessfully, to enforce the observance of specific feasts throughout their dioceses. It is difficult, moreover, to regard these ritual events as occasions, in the first instance, for `universal' (which is what Hen means by `popular') as distinct from `intellectual' religion. For the propers prescribed for many services, those of the sanctoral as well as those of the temporal cycle, include prayers which push contentious theological positions. The proposition that everyone participated in such events begs questions about the extent to which all those involved shared the same understanding of what these rituals meant.

Pulling together an impressive range of material, this book provides a useful but, in the final analysis, deeply flawed survey of the evidence for Christianity in Merovingian Gaul. The fundamental problem is that the argument runs against the grain of the evidence, much of which is the product of conflicts over the destiny of the Church in which the definition of `Christianity' was one of the very points at issue. Caesarius of Arles, for example, articulated a narrow definition of the faith, condemning as `paganism' ritual behaviour which he found unacceptable but which was perfectly acceptable, it appears, to various elements who regarded themselves as `Christian'. If `the Church' could not itself agree over what kinds of worship were or were not `Christian', it seems somewhat beside the point to attempt to show, empirically, that Christian ritual dominated everyday life in Merovingian Gaul. Much more might have been achieved by investigating the differences in what `Christianity' meant to the persons and groups which the sources permit us to observe.

PAUL ANTONY HAYWARD

Oxford