record of its glorious Christian past that would serve as a comfort and a guide in the more
difficult present. His work confirms that the veneration of relics had become central to
the practice of Christianity, and one of his goals was to endow the cults of local saints
with trustworthy histories. In Gregory’s eyes, the most important saintly patron of the
kingdom was Martin of Tours, whose shrine lay outside the walls of his own see.
Though saints of Frankish origin were conspicuously few in the works of Gregory, the
Franks had largely been converted to Christianity. Venantius Fortunatus (d. ca. 601),
bishop of Poitiers, celebrated saints among the women of the Frankish aristocracy.
Foremost among them was Radegund (d. 587), a queen who had left her husband and the
court for ascetic retirement in the convent of the Holy Cross at Poitiers. Fortunatus
composed his memorial of Radegund shortly after her death. Over two decades later,
Baudonivia, a nun of the Holy Cross, composed a second vita. A short time thereafter, an
anonymous nun of Chelles wrote of Balthild, another Frankish queen converted to the
monastic life. These two women were probably the earliest female hagiographers in the
Latin West.
Throughout the 7th century, male members of the Frankish aristocracy entered the
monastic life in increasing numbers, perhaps inspired by the almost military discipline of
Columbanian monasticism, while others took up careers in ecclesiastical administration.
A new type of saint emerged who was representative of and attractive to this ruling elite.
Known to historians as Adelsheilige, or “noble saints,” they included such men as
Sulpicius of Bourges and Eligius of Noyon. The hagiographers who recorded their lives
had, like Baudonivia, Frankish names, but their works were still influenced by Gallo-
Roman literary models provided by Sulpicius Severus and Gregory of Tours.
The contours of hagiography changed dramatically in the 9th century. Ecclesiastical
authorities came to rely increasingly on written documentation for the authenticity of
saints and their veneration. In the Admonitio generalis of 789, Charlemagne renewed a
canon borrowed from an ancient collection that ordered that “the false names of martyrs
and the uncertain memorials of saints should not be venerated.” Five years later, the
bishops whom the emperor gathered at Frankfurt were more explicit: “No new saints
should be honored or invoked, nor shrines to them erected on the roads. Only those saints
are to be venerated in a church who have been chosen on the authority of their Passion or
on the merit of their Life.” The “Passions and Lives” in question were hagiographic texts.
In response to the perceived need for written documentation for the cults of saints,
Carolingian clerics produced many works celebrating the saints of the distant past.
Hincmar of Reims wrote about Remi, Hilduin of Saint-Denis about Denis, and Alcuin of
York about Vedast, to cite only some of the best-known examples. They were forced to
piece together bits of written and oral tradition, along with topoi borrowed from ancient
and respected works of hagiography. Few contemporaries, however, were celebrated by
the Carolingian church as saints, with the exception of those monks and nuns, such as
Boniface and Leoba, who served as missionaries in the Christian borderlands. According
to one survey, some forty-five Lives had been composed in Neustria during the 7th
century to celebrate contemporary figures as saints. By contrast, only ten Lives of such
recently deceased saints were written in the 8th century, and the number dropped to a
mere eight in the 9th.
The Carolingian period also witnessed the growth of hagiography concerning the
posthumous veneration of saints’ relics. Monks compiled collections of miracles
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