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103 chapter three 12 Strategies of Praising: Bishops and Ceremonies Fortunatus’ praise poetry presents an ordered, hierarchical world, in which social harmony derives from and reflects credit on the powerful: bishop in the ecclesiastical world, royalty and high officials in the secular. Two basic rhetorical practices underpin his panegyric methods, figures of substitution and figures of enumeration. Figures of substitution, by which I mean primarily metaphor and substitution metonymy, assimilate the world of the Merovingian potentes to culturally prestigious discursive systems that lend legitimacy and status to the subjects of his praise. For instance biblical metaphors spiritualize the everyday reality of the Frankish church and imply its conformity, under the governance of the bishop, with a supratemporal model of the Christian community. Substitution metonymy, in the case of villa for villa-owner, provides the basis for reading landscape as a symbolic system, a model of social order, with the laudandus at the center. Figures of enumeration, on the other hand, display in horizontal distribution the constituent elements of such an ordered system. At its simplest a sequence of epithets or adjectival phrases lists the conventional virtues of a bishop or ruler. In some of Fortunatus’ epitaphs (4.3.9–12, 4.7.13–14, 4.10.11–14) an individual’s qualities are matched with specific social groupings, thus suggesting a homology between moral and social order. In landscape description the regularized distribution of spatial realms in a harmonious, self-contained system provides an analogy for comparable systems of human social organization . The all-in-one theme draws attention to the hierarchic nature of such systems. Multiplicity, expressible in enumerative schemes, finds unity in the figure of the bishop and his church, in the ruler and his realm, or in the wise administration of a secular official. The benign government of such potentes ensures the coherence and well-being of the disparate elements over which they exercise authority. This is, of course, not to say that Fortunatus gives an accurate account of Frankish society. Only the briefest acquaintance with Gregory of 1. Bobby C. Alexander, “Ceremony,” Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. (Farmington Hills, Mich., 2005), 3:1512. 2. Bourdieu, Language 185–86. 3. Ibid. 130; L’Huillier, L’empire 287–88. 4. Standard subjects of rhetorical descriptions include battles and festivals, both of which accommodate temporal extension, though the majority are static in nature. For descriptions of actions see M. Aygon, “L’ecphrasis et la notion de la description dans la rhetorique antique,” Pallas 41 (1994): 41–56; for the relationship between narrative and description see Gérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1982), 133–37. The two are not entirely distinct modes of literary representation. 104 The Humblest Sparrow Tours’ Histories would banish that illusion. But it was perhaps the very disorder of contemporary Frankish society that made Fortunatus’ gifts especially appreciated. His ability to summon up systems of order—to represent in words a model that the contemporary world and its rulers, however inadequately, might aspire to and that might seem to inform, however approximately, the imperfect reality of actual human relations— this was a valuable talent in the circumstances of Merovingian Gaul. Fortunatus’ poetry performs in words the function ceremony performs in society as a whole. Indeed, if we imagine the poetry recited on a social occasion, at a banquet or some other gathering, before a subset of Frankish society, then it could form the textual component of a larger ceremonial performance. Ceremony concerns itself with “the symbolic representation of socio-cultural arrangements.”1 In Bourdieu’s words “ceremonies [along with other similar cultural practices] constitute the elementary form of objectification and at the same time the conscious realization of the principles of division according to which these groups [of which society is made up] are objectively organized and through which the perception they have of themselves is organized.”2 They play a central role in the construction of social identity and in maintaining consent for the hierarchical order of society and the domination of the ruling classes.3 Fortunatus’ praise poetry, though on a different scale, serves the same function. In the simpler poems the praise is literal and lacks the symbolic dimension characteristic of ceremony. But when instruments of various nations strike up in praise of Duke Lupus (7.8.61–70) or when landscape features array themselves around a villa in idealized fertility, these patterns of order acquire by the processes of metaphor and metonymy a clear symbolic value...

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