Evidence ID
E02612Saint Name
Severinus, bishop in Bordeaux (south-west Gaul), ob. AD 420 : S01273Saint Name in Source
SeverinusType of Evidence
Literary - Hagiographical - Other saint-related textsEvidence not before
587Evidence not after
588Activity not before
420Activity not after
587Place of Evidence - Region
Gaul and Frankish kingdomsPlace of Evidence - City, village, etc
ToursPlace of evidence - City name in other Language(s)
Tours
Tours
Tours
Toronica urbs
Prisciniacensim vicus
Pressigny
Turonorum civitas
Ceratensis vicus
CéréMajor author/Major anonymous work
Gregory of ToursCult activities - Places
Cult building - independent (church)Cult activities - Non Liturgical Practices and Customs
Saint as patron - of a communityCult Activities - Miracles
Apparition, vision, dream, revelation
Miracle after death
Miraculous appointment to officeCult Activities - Protagonists in Cult and Narratives
Ecclesiastics - bishopsSource
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
Severinus of Bordeaux (PCBE 4, 'Severinus 3') apparently lived in the early 5th century, but no written reference to him survives from earlier than the 580s, when this entry in Gregory's Glory of the Confessors and the Life of Severinus by Venantius Fortunatus (E07358) were produced more or less contemporaneously.
Gregory goes into some detail about the sources of his information on Severinus: stating that he knows that nothing had previously been written about him (nulla cognovimus esse conscripta), he attributes Severinus' story to 'the trustworthy account of the Bordeaux clergy themselves' (ipsorum Burdegalensium clericorum fidelis relatio), evidently transmitted orally. At the end of the entry he states that only after writing it did he discover that 'the priest Fortunatus' had written a Life of Severinus (his language does not seem to imply that he had read it). While it therefore appears that the two accounts were written independently of each other, they both derived from the same source of information – the oral traditions current in the church of Bordeaux. Unsurprisingly, the two versions of Severinus' life tell essentially the same story: in both narratives, Severinus comes to Bordeaux as a stranger during the episcopate of Amandus, who cedes his office to him and resumes it only after Severinus' death; Severinus is buried at Bordeaux, and becomes the patron and protector of the city, miraculously preserving it from various threats. There are, however, notable differences in detail between the two versions.
Amandus, the bishop of Bordeaux depicted as yielding his office to Severinus (PCBE 4, 'Amandus 2'), is a well-attested figure who was part of the circle of Paulinus of Nola and one of the recipients of his letters. On the basis of references in the letters, his accession to the see can be dated to 401/404. Paulinus mentions nothing that corresponds to the events depicted by Gregory and Venantius Fortunatus; however, his latest references to Amandus date from no later than about 405, and nothing is known about Amandus after that point.
When introducing Severinus, Gregory says only that he came 'from the East' (de partibus orientis). In the Latin of Gregory's time this phrase would normally denote the East Roman empire – a conveniently distant and non-specific place of origin for a mysterious stranger – and there is nothing in the transmitted text to suggest that Gregory meant anything else. Gregory says nothing further about Severinus' background, not even explicitly stating that he was in clerical orders (though this can presumably be inferred from Amandus' decision to make him bishop). Fortunatus, on the other hand, claims that Severinus was the bishop of Trier.
In Gregory's account of Amandus' vision, God appears to the bishop in a dream and tells him to welcome Severinus to Bordeaux. Amandus himself subsequently decides to resign his office as bishop and bestow it on Severinus, because he loved and respected him so much (in tantum dilexit ac veneratus est). In the version of Fortunatus, he is commanded in the vision to give up his bishopric to Severinus.
Gregory only briefly alludes to Severinus' posthumous cult and miracles, which are described in much greater detail by Fortunatus. The church of Severinus outside the walls of Bordeaux that Gregory mentions is the present-day Saint-Seurin (Février 1998, 32; Barraud and Maurin 2014, 67).Bibliography
Edition:
Krusch B., Gregorii Turonensis Opera: Liber in gloria confessorum (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum I.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:
Barraud, D., and Maurin, L., "Bordeaux," in: F. Prévot, M. Gaillard, and N. Gauthier (eds.), Topographie chrétienne des cités de la Gaule des origines au milieu du VIIIe siècle, vol. 16: Quarante ans d'enquête (1972-2012): 1. Images nouvelles des villes de la Gaule (Paris, 2014).
Février, P.-A., "Bordeaux," in: N. Gauthier (ed.), Topographie chrétienne des cités de la Gaule des origines au milieu du VIIIe siècle, vol. 10: Province ecclésiastique de Bordeaux (Aquitania Secunda) (Paris, 1998), 19-33.
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.
