Christianity's Quiet Success: The Eusebius Gallicanus Sermon Collection and the Power of the Church in Late Antique Gaul

Epilogue

Epilogue This book has focused on the primary moments in the life of the­ Eusebius Gallicanus sermons: their composition in the fifth century and their compilation into a collection in the sixth. Their story did not end there, however. The sermons survive in 447 manuscripts produced between the seventh century and the dawn of the age of print. The collection continued to be copied, in whole and in part, while sermons were excerpted from it and incorporated into other homiliaries, into monastic resource books, and into collections of material on specific saints. It was quoted by florilegists, drawn on by Carolingian homilists, and read by theologians. Sections of it were even absorbed into the liturgy.1 This subsequent history is important for several reasons. It helps students of the Eusebius Gallicanus understand the nature and purpose of the collection, and it gives a sense of the ongoing influence of the pastoral strategies in it. The sermons of the Eusebius Gallicanus had, quite unrecognised, an important place in the developing intellectual tradition of the Church. No account of them would be complete without some recognition of this. 131 132 Christianity’s Quiet Success The history of the sermons has relevance also to students of medieval preaching in general. It reminds us that it is not enough to describe the emergence of new preachers and to study freshly composed sermons : to get a full picture of medieval homiletics we need also to trace the ongoing use of older texts. The adaptation and application of these texts can tell us much about cultural and religious conti­ nuities, but it can also highlight points of departure and difference. Medieval people lived with a very present past, and the Eusebius Gallicanus sermons were part of it. This epilogue will not provide a systematic analysis of the manuscript tradition of the Eusebius Gallicanus sermons. That work has already been done by Glorie and Leroy, and my comments rely­ heavily on their meticulous scholarship.2 Here I wish merely to draw out some of the implications of their work. Although Leroy and Glorie were both striving to produce an edition, their manuscript work reveals the result as representing but one part of the sermons’ history. Many scholars now recognise the limitations of an edition. Even the best ones efface the “essential plurality” of medieval texts as they appear in manuscripts.3 They freeze one moment in a continuous history of writing and reify that moment as a true and proper statement of what the text is.4 The misleading view of the text which can result from this treatment is especially clear in the case of the Eusebius Gallicanus. The collection was not stable or hermetically sealed and it was never considered as such by those who used it. Instead, as we have already noted, it was cannibalised, edited, and reworked from almost the moment of its inception, and it may itself have been the product of such processes. While the compiler’s intention may well have been to make preaching more stable and predictable by fixing a number of approved texts in a convenient collection, he relinquished control as soon as the collection was made. As Cerquiglini notes, “the work copied by hand, manipulated, always open and as good as unfinished, invited intervention, annotation and commentary.”5 Those who came after edited and reworked, stole and discarded. The Eusebius Gallicanus collection as we have it is but one act in an ongoing plagiaristic sequence. Epilogue 133 The Eusebius Gallicanus collection was not, therefore, a final or definitive statement of a particular pastoral ideology. Instead it was a group of texts, united by a common approach and often appearing together, but still separable in practice and constantly evolving.6 To capture this sense of the Eusebius Gallicanus properly, it is necessary to step away from the comfort of the edition and into the murky and far less stable world of the manuscripts. Each manuscript tells a story of one way in which the sermons were used. Some stories are more decipherable than others, however, and here I must confess that I am no paleographer. I dabble from a sense of the importance of­ manuscripts, but without expertise. I rely on what the experts have said, and where they cannot conclude or agree I am forced to silence. Nonetheless, some observations can be made with confidence, and they are worth making. There are clues which suggest...