L'usage du passé entre Antiquité tardive et haut Moyen Âge: Hommage à Brigitte Beaujard (review)

The most provocative essay in this collection is also the shortest. In the volume's brief final chapter, Nancy Gauthier tells a cautionary tale of the journey of Saint Expédit from the Martyrologium hieronymianum to the roadside shrines of modern Île de Réunion (some five hundred miles east of Madagascar) and the "hit-parade des saints" in contemporary Guadeloupe and Brazil. Together with his evolution from a patron of early modern shop-keepers to a creolized first responder for today's urgent causes (including love affairs and, elsewhere, computer hacking), Expeditus's unlikely migrations highlight the imponderables that surround the diffusion of many saints' cults, disclose the gaps that separate the confident traditions of public memory from the circumspect histories of modern scholars, and offer lessons to all committed to understanding the religious life of late antiquity.

For such reasons, Gauthier's travels along the routes trod by Saint Expédit also best capture the spirit of Brigitte Beaujard's Le culte des saints en Gaule: Les premiers temps. D'Hilaire de Poitiers à la fin du VIe siècle (2000), the inspiration for these essays written by Beaujard's colleagues, friends, and students. Otherwise, that thoughtful attention to the interplay of history, memory, and identity that is one hallmark of Beaujard's work is less evident here than the volume's title might suggest. Of the seven other contributors only Claire Sotinel and Valérie Fauvinet-Ranson openly engage such themes. The latter's exploration of the souvenir of the old gods in Cassiodorus's Variae suggests that by the early sixth century Italy's pagan past had been sufficiently tamed that Cassiodorus could not only gracefully deploy the names of the gods metonymically and analogically (that is, rhetorically) but even—by valorizing the same euhemerist claims that a century before had served in Prudentius's merciless assault on paganism—honor the classical gods, or rather the men behind them, as the inventors of the arts of civilization. Thus Cassiodorus's implicit re-evaluation of the past, which cast former Italic religious practices as erroneous rather than demonic, compares structurally with the manipulations of more recent history that Sotinel identifies in the Liber Pontificalis. Sotinel's target is the Liber's apparently confused entry on Vigilius, whose years in office (537–55) were deeply troubled by the Three Chapters controversy. Vigilius's vita, Sotinel argues, was a partisan effort composed several generations later. Its omissions, notably of any direct reference to the Three Chapters controversy, as well as its miscues demonstrate not its author's ignorance but his desire to create the illusion of Rome's mid-sixth-century relevance, the vitality of papal authority, and the continuity of tradition under Vigilius and his successors. Memory, as Beaujard showed, prefers continuity.

Less nuanced in their approach to these issues are two essays that nonetheless do foreground the relationship between writers and their literary heritage. In a study of Dracontius's Romulea 5, a seemingly benign verse controversia, Caroline Michel d'Annoville and Annick Stoehr-Monjou argue that the fifth-century poet adroitly molded his rhetorical and literary inheritance into a subtle critique of the abuse of social and legal privilege in Vandal North Africa. While these authors intimate that Dracontius saw his literary inheritance as an ethical as well as rhetorical wellspring, endowing the past with a vitality that might be revived and redirected, Françoise Prévot's study of the late antique and early medieval lives of several Aquitanian saints (e.g., Amantius and Dalmatius) largely spends its energy cataloging debts to Sulpicius Severus's Vita Martini and the works of Gregory of Tours. Only when Prévot turns to the issue of the Vita Dalmatii's suppression and misrepresentation of local history does he begin to engage the richer issues explored in Sotinel's discussion of the Liber Pontificalis.

The volume's three remaining essays, whatever...