Gregorius. An Incestuous Saint in Medieval Europe and Beyond by Brian Murdoch (review)

Brian Murdoch appropriately entitles the first chapter of his study “hystoria rara, sed graciosa” (an unusual but agreeable story), which is how a Latin prose version announces the legend of the apocryphal saint Gregorius, a tale of double incest and harsh atonement for sin that culminates in the sinner’s elevation to the papacy. The tale indeed is unusual, but so agreeable that it has been transmitted in over twenty-five languages, beginning in the twelfth century and extending into the twentieth. The generic and contextual range of the tale of Gregorius is remarkable and spans a variety of genres, in verse and prose, including vita, exemplum, folk tale, chap book, drama, and novel. Murdoch’s study is a magnificent analysis and account of the story of the good sinner through the centuries.

The tale of the incestuous saint exemplifies “the paradox implicit in Christianity, the human potential of being both good and sinful” (p. 30). The earliest text recounting the story of Gregorius is the Vie du pape Saint Grégoire, a metrical version in octosyllabic rhymed couplets, the oldest manuscript of which is dated to the early thirteenth century. The Vie du pape Saint Grégoire, thought to have been composed around 1150, opens with an exhortation to listen “to the life of a good sinner,” and although it is “frightful to tell this story,” Holy Scripture “instructs us that the greater the sin, the more often it must be recounted, so that others may take a lesson” (p. 34). This is the source of the Middle English Gregorius poem, transmitted in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts, and, more importantly, of Hartmann von Aue’s late twelfth-century Middle High German Gregorius, which is a literary high point and which in the Middle Ages was the source of a broad range of texts in both High and Low German and in Latin.

Murdoch gives a detailed and comparative accounting of both the Vie du pape Saint Grégoire and Hartmann’s Gregorius, discussing not only the texts with pertinent supporting citations but also linking various motifs to Sacred Scripture, the writings of the Church Fathers, and the apocryphal Vita Adae et Evae, the last in respect to the fall and redemption, to the issues of original and actual sin. Basic to Hartmann’s Gregorius, written around 1190, is the question of evil, man’s share in original sin, and the propensity to sinfulness.

Hartmann’s Gregorius engendered two Latin recreations, both in verse. The chronicler Arnold of Lübeck, known for his Chronica Slavorum, rendered the legend around 1210 in rhymed couplets of varying types. His Gesta Gregorii peccatoris, similar in length to Hartmann’s version, differs from it in the extensive use of Biblical and exegetical materials for narrative emphasis and in presenting a theology of sin as such. Two manuscripts from the latter part of the fourteenth century, containing lives of the Virgin and other saints and intended as a school text, transmit a reduced version of Hartmann’s Gregorius in 453 Ovidian hexameters. Murdoch notes that Gregorius, who is repeatedly identified as sanctus in this text, is intended as a mirror for sinners. Nonetheless, this metrical version of the story makes it clear that the extraordinary penance of Gregorius is not required for the ordinary sinner. While fate is inescapable, the text suggests that “evil is permitted so as to lead to good ends” (p. 108).

In the chapter entitled “A European Prose Tradition” (pp. 109–52) Murdoch discusses the prose texts deriving ultimately from the French and German metrical versions in a period of over three centuries. The earliest prose texts in Latin, French, and High and Low German are joined by English, Swedish, and Icelandic versions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The prose versions are hagiographic and exemplary in nature, the latter most famously in the late thirteenth-century Gesta Romanorum. The story of Gregorius entered print in the popular High...