Talk:Gregory of Tours
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
Gregory of Tours is within the scope of WikiProject France, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to France and Monaco on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please join the project and help with our open tasks. | |
 |
||
| ??? | This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses. | |
 |
Gregory of Tours is part of the WikiProject Saints, an effort to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Saints on the Wikipedia. This includes but is not limited to saints as well as those not so affiliated, country and region-specific topics, and anything else related to saints. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. |
| Start | This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale. |
| High | This article has been rated as high-importance on the importance scale. |
I do not think that Gregory was writing to please the Frankian kings at all! He was much more concerned with the Church and with religious matters.
- Sorry, but I think that, like Einhard a couple of centuries later, he was also somewhat concerned with the people he served. Never underestimate the importance of patronage. Who are you? JHK
- I agree with the contributor above. One must remember when reading the Historia Francorum that this is a royal history, and that Gregory was most likely writing to please his patrons. It it likely for that reason that one royal Frankish house is more generously treated than others. Gregory's chronicle just is not a 'house history' written for Merovingians, judging from the excerpts I've been reading (to which I'm creating links). I'm enlarging this entry, so there'll be plenty to pull apart. Wetman 17:04, 24 Jan 2004 (UTC)
-
- I would agree that Gregory's Histories was affected by the kings he served (particularly given that he was arrested for slander by Chilperic whilst writing it), and because he, and Tours, were under the jurisdiction of so many of the different Frankish kings it's interesting to see how his opinions about people change (or become more forceful) depending on the time period, who's in charge and who's dead.
-
- But for him religion is everything - the portents and the saints and the church are what seem to drive him to write. They're in everything and they explain everything (comets in the sky come before kings die, and bad times are coming whenever a giant shows up), in particular secular events. There was/is the argument that the History of the Franks wasn't the original name for the text, that it should be called simply the Histories. Ren 03:40, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
- All these Early Medieval chronicles and histories begin at the beginning with the Creation. It means that in a history of six volumes, no one reads any but the last two... --Wetman 05:13, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I'm removing the reference near the bottom of the page that concerns how his canonisation hasn't affected the mainstream view of him as a historian. I don't see how it would affect this, and so it is unnecessary. His role as a bishop leads him to talk of miracles all the time in HF, and this may make the historian take him with a grain of salt, but the fact that he was a bishop is an issue separate from his being a saint. Carl.bunderson 23:04, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
The birthdates disagree. I was under the impression that no-one is precisely sure of the date, but that it's probably 538.
[edit] Picture
The picture on this page of "Saint Gregory with Augustine of Hippo" is not of Gregory of Tours at all, but rather of Saint Gregory the Great. You can tell because he's wearing a papal tiara, and the Holy Spirit is about to speak to him in the form of a dove. Someone should find a new picture. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 76.81.10.140 (talk • contribs).
