The Life of the Jura Fathers: The Life and Rule of the Holy Fathers Romanus, Lupicinus, and Eugendus, Abbots of the Monasteries in the Jura Mountains, with appendices, Avitus of Vienne, Letter XVIIII to Viventiolus, and Eucherius of Lyon, The Passion of the Martyrs of Agaune, Saint Maurice and His Companions, and In Praise of the Desert (review)

At the core of this book is a translation of the Vita patrum iurensium, an anonymous work of the early sixth century. It describes the monastic activities of Romanus, Lupicinus, and Eugendus in the Jura mountains, an area that during the later fifth and early sixth centuries constituted "a frontier zone between the territory controlled by the Burgundians and that controlled by the Alamans" (Edward James, Gregory of Tours: Life of the Fathers, 2nd edn. [Liverpool, 1991], p. 4, n. 3). The translation is based on François Martine's excellent edition and French translation of 1968, and is relatively free of errors, although one could quibble with word choice at some points (e.g., "in the torpor of prolixity" for sub prolixitatis torpore, p. 129). The translation is preceded by an introduction that includes a survey of eastern Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries, a brief history of Gallic monasticism (supplemented by Adalbert de Vogüé's valuable Foreword), an analysis of the way of life and spirituality of the Jura Fathers, and a chatty account of the authors' own religious tourism in the "footsteps" of the Fathers.

The book's main problems appear in its appendices, which translate three documents tangentially related to the Jura monasteries. The document with the most problems is the shortest: Letter 19 of Avitus of Vienne (pp. 185-186), written in 516/517 to Viventiolus, a priest and monk at the monastery founded by Romanus at Condat. It is admittedly a difficult letter. Danuta Shanzer and Ian Wood identify it in their recent translation of Avitus as "among his more maddeningly allusive and corrupt works" (Avitus of Vienne: Letters and Selected Prose [Liverpool, 2002], p. 268). But the reader of Vivian et al. will come away without understanding even some of the letter's basic points: that it thanks Viventiolus for a real sella, not a metaphorical "monk's chair"; that it is not Viventiolus who "earnestly" seeks a bishop's cathedra for himself (which would be most improper), but Avitus who seeks one for him; and that it is not by priestly but precisely by episcopal leadership (sacerdotali magisterio) that Viventiolus will protect the monastery in the future. Of the other two documents, the translation of Eucherius's In Praise of the Desert, has only small errors, such as Capriasius for Caprasius (p. 214). But Eucherius's Passion of the Theban legion martyred at Agaune leaves the reader puzzled on more than one occasion. It opens with the present tense "I am afraid" for the imperfect Verebar namque (p. 188), and muddles the chain of authorities listed in the following sentence. What Eucherius says there is not that "Saint Isaac, bishop of Geneva... acknowledged the account of the passion that I presented to him" (p. 189), but that a much vaguer group of auctores affirmed that Isaac was their source (qui adfirmabant se ab episcopo Genavensi sancto Isaac hunc quem praetuli passionis ordinem cognovisse: "who asserted that they had learned from saint Isaac, bishop of Geneva, the account of the passion that I [Eucherius] have set forth"). Further on, the ablative absolute velut vacatione barbaris gentibus data is...