Within and Without: Lay People and the Church in Gregory of Tours’ Miracle Stories

Gregory of Tours’ miracle collections are filled with lay people, sometimes standing in the foreground but more often lurking anonymously in the background. We are familiar with the seekers of cures, but they are surrounded in the texts by retinues of other figures, often mentioned only in passing. Many of these figures are connected to the institutions of the church in complicated ways. Some have established themselves on church grounds as beggars, the professional poor or servants; others are irregular ascetics or their financial supporters. They occupy a grey zone in the religious world of early medieval Gaul and defy any neat categorisation of the population into “religious” or “secular.”They are thereby a means to challenge the definitions of lay status offered both in contemporary sources and in the works of modern historians seeking to trace the late antique frontier between lay and clerical. These figures can reveal a great deal about the position of the Gallic church in local communities – how it operated both as a resource to those around it, and how it benefited from those who “served” it in many different capacities. Gregory’s miracle collections also give some indications of the agency of the laity in using and manipulating religious institutions to their own ends. They reveal a world in which the church, its institutions, and its people have become thoroughly embedded in the cultural world of late antique Gaul.