Gregory of Tours, in his Glory of the Confessors (28), gives an account of two miracles that occurred at the tomb of *Martialis (first bishop of Limoges, S01168) in Limoges (western Gaul): a girl with a stiffened hand and a man unable to speak after he had sworn a false oath were healed there. Written in Latin in Tours (north-west Gaul), 587/588.
E02581
Literary - Hagiographical - Other saint-related texts
Gregory of Tours
Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors 28
Gregory recounts the story of two miracles at the grave of Martialis:
28. Puella quaedam, cui, nescio quo exsistente peccato, manus una diriguit ac digiti palmae defixerant, ad eius sepulchrum advenit, confisa de virtute confessoris, quod possit eius intercessio manum aridam absolvere, cuius praedicatio populum vanis superstitionum ritibus inrititum absolvit. Celebratis ergo vigiliis in ipsa nocte festivitatis, dum adtente iuxta sepulchrum orat, manum suam directis digitis populo teste sanatam miratur adtonita.
[In hac ergo solemnitate mutus] quidam eloquium emeruit hoc modo. Hic etenim, ut cruda operatur rusticitas populorum, iuramentum mendax in eclesia protulit. Mox rigente lingua mutus effectus est, ita ut non vocis humanae, sed bidentis mugitum simulare videretur. Adveniens autem ad huius confessoris tumulum, prosternitur ad orationem, sensitque, ut postea adserebat, tamquam si aliquis guttur eius tangeret; quod, ut credo, virtus erat dominici confessoris. Erectusque, presbiterum qui aderat nutu deprecabatur, ut signum crucis faucibus clausis inponeret. Quod cum presbiter fecisset, iterum prosternitur ad orationem; protinus elevatum, vocis officio reddito, omnia quae pertulerat proprio patefecit eloquio.
'28. A girl whose one hand had stiffened (I do not know what her sin was) and whose fingers were fixed in her palm came to the tomb of Martialis. She trusted in the power of the confessor, that the intercession of the man whose preaching had freed people who were ensnared by the false rituals of superstition could also loosen her withered hand. Then, during the celebration of the vigils on the night of his festival, while she was attentively praying before his tomb, she was surprised and marveled at how her hand was healed and the fingers straightened. The people witnessed [this miracle].
A man deserved [to regain] his speech in this manner. This man, as the coarse rusticity of people behaves, swore a false oath in the cathedral. Soon his tongue stiffened and he became mute, so that he seemed to imitate not the sound of a human voice but the lowing of an animal. But he went to the tomb of this confessor and knelt in prayer. As he later claimed, he felt as if someone had touched his throat; this, as I believe, was the power of the confessor of the Lord. The man stood up and with a nod requested a priest who was present to make the sign of the cross over his clenched jaws. After the priest did this, again the man knelt in prayer. Immediately upon standing he regained the use of his voice and in his own words revealed everything that he had suffered.'
Text: Krusch 1969, 315.
Translation: Van Dam 1988, 42.
Saint’s feast
Cult PlacesBurial site of a saint - tomb/grave
Cult building - independent (church)
Non Liturgical ActivityVigils
Prayer/supplication/invocation
Oath
MiraclesMiracle after death
Healing diseases and disabilities
Punishing miracle
RelicsBodily relic - entire body
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesWomen
Other lay individuals/ people
Ecclesiastics - lesser clergy
Source
Gregory, of a prominent Clermont family with extensive ecclesiastical connections, was bishop of Tours from 573 until his death (probably in 594). He was the most prolific hagiographer of all Late Antiquity. He wrote four books on the miracles of Martin of Tours, one on those of Julian of Brioude, and two on the miracles of other saints (the Glory of the Martyrs and Glory of the Confessors), as well as a collection of twenty short Lives of sixth-century Gallic saints (the Life of the Fathers). He also included a mass of material on saints in his long and detailed Histories, and produced two independent short works: a Latin version of the Acts of Andrew and a Latin translation of the story of The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.Gregory probably wrote the greater part of the Glory of the Confessors (Liber in Gloria Confessorum) between late 587 and mid-588, since in ch. 6 he tells us that he has already written three books on the miracles of Martin (and the last datable miracle in Book 3 of his Miracles of Martin occurred in November 587), while in ch. 93 he tells us that Charimeris, who became bishop of Verdun in 588, was 'now' a royal referendary (so not yet a bishop). It is, however, likely that Gregory was collecting and recording these stories throughout his life, and for our purposes precise dating is not of great importance, since Gregory's views on the role of saints and the correct ways to venerate them do not seem to have changed during his writing life. (On the dating of the work, see Van Dam 2004, xii; Shaw 2016, 105.)
The last two chapters (109 and 110), in which divine punishment falls on avaricious merchants in a manner that is not focused on a particular 'confessor', do not sit comfortably with the rest of the work, and, even more tellingly, near the end there are three chapters with headings but no content (105, 106 and 107, E02777). Consequently Krusch suggested (and this hypothesis has been widely accepted) that the work was left in an incomplete state, its final completion and editing being prevented by Gregory's death.
As Gregory himself makes clear in his Preface (where he lists his eight works of hagiography), the Glory of the Confessors (just like his Glory of the Martyrs) is not about the lives of his saints, but is a collection of their miracle-stories: 'This, the eighth [book], we have written on the miracles of Confessors' (Octavum hunc scribimus de miraculis confessorum). Occasionally we do learn something about the lives of the men and women that he includes, but for the most part we are just given their name and, sometimes, religious status ('bishop', 'abbot', 'hermit', or whatever) and a description of a miracle (or miracles) that Gregory attributes to them. The large majority of these miracles are posthumous (in Life of the Fathers 2.2 Gregory expresses a preference for posthumous miracles, over miracles in life, as reliable indicators of sanctity - see E00023).
Elsewhere in his work (in the preface to his Life of Illidius, in Life of the Fathers), Gregory provides a definition of a 'confessor': someone who had taken up 'various crosses of abstinence' (diversas abstinentiae cruces) to live the Christian life. But here in Glory of the Confessors, the category is in practice much more broadly drawn, to include any individual able to effect a miracle, who wasn't a martyr; in many cases Gregory knew nothing about the life of the confessor, only about one or more miracles, for the most part posthumous and at the tomb. For Gregory, anyone with an attested miracle (he would, presumably, have said 'reliably attested') was a 'confessor' and could be included in this work. Consequently, a remarkable number of extremely shadowy figures feature. To take a few examples: a man buried in a tomb in Clermont, from which scrapings of dust cured people (ch. 35, E02595); a chaste but loving couple of Clermont, whose sarcophagi miraculously moved to be next to each other (ch. 31, E02583); and three priests of the village of Aire-sur-l'Ardour, whose graves were slowly rising out of the ground (ch. 51, E02640). In all of these cases, and several more besides, Gregory could not even put reliable names to the confessors concerned. Gregory's interest was not in the people, but in the miraculous that manifested itself around holy individuals: for instance, in ch.96 (E02755) he tells the story of a hermit whose only recorded miracle was his ability to cook his food over a blazing fire in a wooden pot; Gregory uses the story as an example of how God makes even the elements of nature obey the needs of the holy.
Only occasionally does Gregory name his informants. But it is clear that many of his stories derived from his own observations in Clermont and Tours, and from what he heard from visitors to Tours, and on his own travels; Gregory had visited large numbers of the shrines he described, had venerated many of these saints' relics, and had even been a participant at a few of the events described.
Because Gregory was so inclusive in those he ranked as 'confessors', his text is rich in evidence of cults emerging around some very obscure figures, as long as people (including Gregory) believed they had miraculous powers from their graves. In many cases these cults were probably short-lived; but in a few cases they appear to have become at least semi-institutionalised: for instance, two otherwise wholly unknown virgins, buried on a hill in the Touraine, persuaded a man to build a stone oratory over their graves, and also persuaded the then bishop of Tours to come and bless it (ch. 18, E02561), and a young girl of the Paris region, about whom nothing but her name and pious epitaph were known, acquired a considerable reputation as a healer (particularly of toothache), and again a stone oratory over her grave (ch. 103, E02767).
Unlike the Glory of the Martyrs, which includes many martyrs from beyond Gaul, almost all the saintly figures in Glory of the Confessors are Gallic: the sole exceptions are, from Syria, Symeon the Stylite (ch. 26, E02579), and, from Italy, Eusebius of Vercelli and Paulinus of Nola (chs. 3 and 108, E02453 and E02778). Within Gaul, after miracles involving angels, Hilary of Poitiers and Eusebius of Vercelli (chs. 1-3), the confessors are bunched together by their city-territory, in other words where they were buried (which in almost all cases is also where the recorded miracles occurred). There is no logic to the order in which Gregory presented these cities, beyond the fact that he placed the two cities he knew most about, Tours (chs. 4-25) and Clermont (chs. 29-35) very close to the start. At the end of the book, from ch. 90, saints appear from city-territories that have already been covered earlier in the work (chs. 90 and 100, Bourges; ch. 96, Autun; chs. 101-102, Limoges; ch. 103, Paris; ch. 104, Poitiers) – the most likely explanation is that these are saints that Gregory added after he had written the greater part of the book.
There are some digressions in the book, as we would expect in a work by the discursive Gregory – for instance, a miracle story of Martin set in Visigothic Spain (ch. 12) leads Gregory into two stories on the spiritual powerlessness of Arian priests (chs. 13 and 14) – but there are fewer digressions than in Gregory's parallel work, the Glory of the Martyrs.
There is a good general discussion of Glory of the Confessors in Van Dam 2004, ix-xxi, and of Gregory's hagiography more widely in Shaw 2015.
(Bryan Ward-Perkins)
Discussion
These two stories are reprised, in one case using many of the same words, in a collection of nine Miracles of Martialis, that is possibly of the seventh century (see E08524, §1 and §3).Bibliography
Edition:Krusch, B., Liber in gloria martyrum, in: Gregorii Turonensis Opera. 2: Miracula et opera minora (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum 1.2; 2nd ed.; Hannover, 1969).
Translation:
Van Dam, R., Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Martyrs (Translated Texts for Historians 4; 2nd ed., Liverpool, 2004).
Further reading:
Shaw, R., "Chronology, Composition, and Authorial Conception in the Miracula", in: A.C. Murray (ed.), A Companion to Gregory of Tours (Leiden-Boston 2015), 102-140.
Katarzyna Wojtalik
31/03/2017
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S01168 | Martialis, first bishop of Limoges | Martialis | Certain |
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