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Abstract
The Merovingian dynasty ruled Francia for almost three hundred years, and a substantial portion of that kingdom’s record survives in the form of hagiography. This used to disappoint historians: from a formal perspective, vitae are principally dedicated to narrating the virtues and accomplishments of exemplary Christians. They do not claim to be exhaustive surveys. But in a time of great political and social experimentation, as the seventh and early eighth centuries were, there was hardly a consensus on what constituted a good life (“vita”), and by extension a good society, in the first place. As a result, the hagiography of this period was inherently argumentative. And because they argued for no less than a restructured Merovingian polity—in terms of its government, its wealth, and its identity—hagiographers blended elements of history, literature, and theology, along with theories of writing, orality, and cognition, in order to captivate and persuade.
The vitae direct our attention to a major transformation in Francia that left traces throughout the historical record, which is that the standards for political legitimacy were changing in response to Christian ideas about social responsibility. This was a change that the vitae both documented and engineered. As a result, these texts offer privileged but complicated access to the social and intellectual world of the later Merovingian period. If scholars have already shrugged off earlier disappointments and turned to hagiography to flesh out their sense of the period, the contribution of this project is to focus on the vitae themselves as participants in that history, to consider critically the relationship between hagiography and the society it sought to represent and transform. The boundary between text and reality was porous, not just because poststructuralists suggest we see it that way, but also because hagiography insisted on it. In their narratives, and through their narratives, the vitae restructured the terms of interdependence between the crown, aristocracy, clergy, and the general population at a time when the kingdom was especially receptive to new ways of defining and defending itself.
