Note on Translations

For the reader’s convenience I have generally referred to published translations wherever these are available and suitable, although I have supplied my own versions where I felt that appropriate. Scriptural translations are those of the Revised Standard Version unless the primary source departs substantially from that text. Where no translator is noted, the translation is my own. Names of authors are given in Latin versions except where there is a widely accepted Anglicized alternative.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Most Christians in late antique Gaul were lay. They were baptized members of the church, who had not been ordained and did not live in organized religious communities as monks or nuns.¹ This book explores the religious worlds of those lay Christians. It takes a two-pronged approach. First and foremost, it is an attempt to reconstruct the religious experiences and environments of that vast, yet largely silent and too often overlooked majority of the Christian population. To this end, it explores how religion was manifested in their physical worlds, how they engaged ritually with Christianity, how they behaved, what they knew about their religion and what they believed. It argues that lay people were active and important in the development of Christianity as a community religion.² However, the book also analyses how and why clergy and ascetics used the category ‘lay’.³ The boundaries around the laity and definitions of what it meant to be lay changed according to the needs of those who deployed the term. Yet despite this artificial and constructed nature, the category had profound implications for all late antique Christians. As the Penitential of Finnian put it, the penance of a layman (laicus) was less than that of a cleric (clericus) even when they committed the same sin, because the layman is ‘a man of this world (homo seculi hujus) and his guilt is lighter in this world and his reward less in the world to come’.⁴ There were different behavioural expectations for clergy and laity, different consequences for religious misbehaviour, and different rewards in the afterlife. Although these two prongs of constructions and lived realities require different approaches, and the posing of different questions, they must be considered together. How the church defined the laity as a category helped to determine what religious experiences lay people could and did have. Furthermore, since most of our evidence for the religious worlds of the laity comes from clerical sources, any analysis has to engage constantly with the question of how they were presented and distorted in our sources.

The term ‘religious worlds’ encompasses both of these aspects of the study. It includes the experiences and environments of Gallic lay Christians as well as the ways in which their worlds were shaped by the expectations and demands of the church as an institution. It is also particularly appropriate because clergy and ascetics frequently referred to the laity as the ‘people of the world’ – the saeculares. By this, they meant that lay Christians were those Christians who continued to engage in ‘worldly’ pursuits such as marriage, warfare, and economic activities. The clergy and ascetics, on the other hand, presented themselves as people who were ‘unworldly’ and who had devoted themselves to lives of religion instead of engaging in secular concerns. In practice, the distinction was seldom so straightforward – these were the ideals, not the realities. Nonetheless, ‘worldliness’ was central to the clerical definition of what it meant to be lay. My task is to examine what the worlds of these lay people may have looked like.

In order to address the big issues around the development of the Christian church and the experiences of the majority of its members, I have chosen to focus on a particular place and a particular time: Gaul, between c. 400 and c. 700.⁵ Several scholars have recently insisted that we cannot speak of a singular Christianity in this period, but must instead think in terms of local or micro-Christianities, a situation exacerbated by the loss of the imperial government as a unifying force.⁶ This study therefore does not attempt to survey the laity across the entire Mediterranean, or even just its Western half, but explores the situation within Gaul, and also draws attention to the very different religious environments of individual cities. Gaul represents an opportunity.⁷ Compared with other regions of the West, it offers a wealth of evidence relating to the laity: sermons, epitaphs, church council records, hagiographies, miracle collections, law codes, letters and more. The gaps remain immense, but the variety of genres permits a more diverse view than is available elsewhere. Gaul is also important because of its subsequent influence. The political and cultural power of the Carolingians ensured that Gallic models and Gallic structures were widely exported and copied. What happened in Gaul had broader implications.

The centuries between 400 and 700 were particularly important for establishing the place of the laity in the Gallic church. By 400, Christianity was dominant – the public practice of polytheism had received a series of fatal blows, the Roman emperors were fully and solely aligned with Christianity, and were set on finding and supporting those versions of it which they deemed orthodox. The power of the centre, however, was rapidly dissipating. Already, in Gaul, local contexts shaped local religious forms. No central authority, emperor or Pope, would determine religious practice for centuries to come. The new barbarian rulers expressed only fitful interest. Local bishops had very limited powers. This situation created an opportunity for lay people, who were able to play a pivotal role in the development and transformation of Christianity, from a minority religion to the dominant cultural force of the middle ages. Christianity was not spread by force. It was not a worked-out system imposed from above upon a population below. On the contrary, lay Christians helped to shape Christianity. They made their own decisions about what being Christian meant in their daily lives. They were responsible, in part, for the formation of beliefs, institutions, rituals and environments. By 700, however, the situation was changing. The Carolingians, uniting political and religious concerns, mark the beginning of an emphasis on unity and central direction that would be the hallmark of the medieval church. This unity was never entirely achieved in practice, but both church and state began to develop more sophisticated mechanisms by which to impose control. A new stage in the history of the laity had begun, but by then it was already too late to undo those features of Christian belief, practice and environment that had put down deep roots. The Carolingians, and those who came after, were working with a palette already laid out for them.

My approach to the religious worlds of the laity in late antique Gaul is in the style of what Julia Smith has called ‘new cultural history’.⁸ That is to say, I am interested in how the people of the past constructed their understandings of reality and organized their experiences, and I treat them as creatures with agency rather than as ‘passive pawns in the grip of impersonal processes’.⁹ I give close attention to language and to the complex relationship between texts and the reality they purport to represent. I also emphasize the pluralism of historical experience more than grand narratives.¹⁰ The work of John Arnold and Sarah Hamilton has shown how much it is possible to say about the religion of the people when you take this approach, and when you have the relative riches of medieval source material at your disposal.¹¹ Both argue strongly that lay belief and behaviour were highly diverse and that the laity were engaged in complex, dynamic relationships with the institutions and representatives of the church. It has proven much more difficult to do this kind of history in late antiquity and the early middle ages, where the evidence record is so much more sparse than that from later centuries. Nonetheless, the People’s History of Christianity series has produced an excellent volume on the late ancient church, with a particular focus on lay piety.¹² Within this volume, David Frankfurter sets out a model of how scholarship on the laity (or on ‘popular religion’, to use his terminology) must proceed: by both examining the rhetoric of official denigration in our sources, and studying how people at the time integrated traditional practices within new schemes of authority.¹³ This is an immensely useful methodology to apply in late antique Gaul.

There has been a long scholarly tradition of pessimism that we can really know about the laity. André Vauchez insisted that it was not possible to write a history of popular religion before the year 1000.¹⁴ Richard Southern commented: ‘we shall never know much about the religion of the ordinary man. What it was that the barbarians of Europe were converted to must remain a very dark mystery.’¹⁵ In contrast, I am fundamentally optimistic. I argue that we can know something about the laity, and that, given their importance, we should make the most of everything we have. In this I am not alone. There has been a recent swell of works determined to explore the religious worlds of ordinary people, despite the difficulties attendant on the task. Marilyn Dunn has advanced a thoughtful discussion of what it was the barbarians were converted to.¹⁶ Jaclyn Maxwell has been engaged in ongoing work to explore the religious worlds of the laity in the late antique East and Leslie Dossey has revealed the complex social and religious environments of the inhabitants of North Africa.¹⁷ Lucy Grig has been exploring the long roots and long futures of late antique cultural forms, with the religion of the people primary among these.¹⁸ All of these authors have attempted to move beyond an awareness of our evidential problems and have refused to let these reduce us to silence. The laity of late antique Gaul also deserve to have their voices heard.

The problem of definition

Part of the reason why they have not been heard often or loudly is that scholars have had great difficulty in defining the laity.¹⁹ The problem is revealed in the treatment of ascetics: they were often not ordained (therefore lay) but lived lives dedicated to religion (therefore not secular), and fall in and out of different scholarly definitions of the laity depending on whether a particular author prioritizes technical or lifestyle criteria.²⁰ In some cases, scholars have treated minor clergy as effectively lay, because their lifestyle is considered indistinguishable from the lifestyle of their parishioners, whereas Neill and Weber have argued that anybody ‘living in and from the Church’, including missionaries, organists, choirmasters, teachers, sextons and church janitors, should not be considered lay, because ‘their outlook is bound to be ecclesiastical in a variety of ways’.²¹ Anyone surveying this literature is bound to leave it feeling thoroughly confused. It should not, therefore, be surprising that some scholars reject the term ‘lay’ entirely, while others use it without trying to define it.²²

There is, of course, also a long tradition of approaching the laity from another angle: that of popular culture. In such works, the subject is seldom defined as ‘lay people’, but rather as ‘ordinary Christians’, ‘non-elites’, ‘the people’ or just ‘popular religion’, all terms with socio-economic implications.²³ The approaches and strategies of scholars working on popular culture have been very influential on my own work, as will become clear. I have chosen, however, to define my subject differently. This book is about religious experience. It is not a book about popular culture in general, or about the experience of non-elites. It is a book that looks closely at the specifically religious worlds of Christians living in late antique and early medieval Gaul. It examines both elite and non-elite members of the laity, because some religious practices cut across such sociological divisions. I am interested in kings, townspeople and the poor alike. Inevitably, elite lay people appear in our sources far more often and with far greater clarity and they threaten at times to subsume other voices. This is a risk: although both a queen and a serving girl could interact with the cult of St Martin, they did so in different ways and perhaps with different expectations. The challenge of this project is therefore to encompass the range of lay experiences without letting the elite perspectives dominate (insofar as this is possible).

The term lay was artificial, and its usage was messy, but it was a meaningful and important concept to late antique Christians. This book uses a basic definition of the laity as baptized members of the church, who had not been ordained and did not live in organized religious communities as monks or nuns. It then explores the variety of ways in which the term lay was used in late antique Gaul, as well as when, where and why complications arose. The laity did not always accept the clerical constructions being placed upon them, but they did have to deal with them. And ultimately the clerics succeeded. By the middle ages, we can take the term ‘lay’ almost entirely for granted, and scholars generally have. Its meaning and implications, as a category, are deemed to be obvious. This book is in part a study of how things came to be that way. The messiness en route, however, is a central part of this story.²⁴

The negative trajectory

Many scholars who have worked on the laity in late antiquity have painted a negative picture of decline from a supposed paradisiacal early situation of Christian equality in which there was no distinction between the clergy and laity.²⁵ The creation of the laity as a category has therefore been depicted as a central part of the creation of hierarchy within the church. As Karen Jo Torjesen puts it, ‘the distinction between clergy and laity in its most elemental form is a way of creating and setting apart an elite’, and results in the creation of the ‘dyad’, which has been described as a defining (and decidedly negative) characteristic of the medieval church.²⁶ Scholars concerned with the problems of the modern Christian churches have therefore lamented ‘the clear trajectory that renders the laity ever more passive and gives ever higher standing to the clergy’.²⁷

The ‘negative trajectory’ is not, however, confined to works with explicitly presentist concerns. Many scholars have argued that the clergy and laity grew gradually apart.²⁸ Others have lamented increased clerical interference in lay religiosity that resulted in the ‘gradual but decisive marginalization of laymen and all women from sacred space’.²⁹ In other words, the differentiation of the laity as a category has been depicted as fundamental to the growth in power of the clergy and inimical to independent lay religious life. In this view, the laity were increasingly defined, confined and demeaned over the course of late antique and medieval history.

However, despite the ubiquity of this negative trajectory in scholarship on the laity, there is no agreement on when it begins. For example, Faivre situates the crucial moment in the third century and Williams also argues for a decline in the role of the laity even before Constantine, to then be ‘virtually extinguished’ in the era of the great councils.³⁰ William Frend pushes the decline slightly later, after the conversion of Constantine, while Lakeland sees a slower development between the third and twelfth centuries, culminating in a situation where ‘the laity are considered in a primarily negative fashion, as those who live in the world in a lower state of holiness than the clergy’.³¹ Other scholars have focused on the late Merovingian or, especially, the Carolingian period.³² Arnold Angenendt also sees the period after 800 as the moment of transition for the laity, with a change and reduction in their liturgical role, whereas Vauchez sees it happening later, as part of the Gregorian reforms of the tenth and eleventh centuries.³³ Torjesen picks out a series of important moments, between the fourth and the twelfth centuries.³⁴ In sum, the laity, like the Roman Empire, are always declining.

All of this chronological variation should raise doubts about the negative trajectory of the laity. The notion of decline becomes meaningless in such circumstances. Moreover, the desire of certain scholars to describe ‘what went wrong’ for the church, and propose ways to fix it, threatens to exaggerate both the early paradise and the later fall from it. It is even more difficult to believe in a clear negative trajectory when descriptions of its character are mutually contradictory: scholars cannot even agree on whether the problem is clergy and laity moving further apart, or becoming inappropriately intertwined. We need to find a new way to think about the history of the laity in late antiquity and the early middle ages.

The first step is to acknowledge that changes over this period were not unidirectional. Some clergy made efforts to separate, marginalize and degrade lay people. Others, however, insisted that clergy and laity should be subject to the same behavioural expectations, or worked hard to bring the laity into religious spaces and ceremonies, rather than exclude them. Many provided positive images of lay religiosity. Furthermore, there is evidence that lay people could be either resistant or indifferent to clerical efforts. At this stage in the development of the Gallic church, the clergy had very limited means to enforce their wishes or impose their views of the religious world. Negative clerical rhetoric about the laity is important, but it is only part of the story. This book puts the laity themselves back into the story.

The evidence

All scholars who work on the laity (or ordinary people, or popular culture) begin with the point that the project is hard, because the voices of these people are largely lost to us. As John Arnold puts it, ‘There is a kind of layperson-shaped hole in the middle of the evidence: we can feel our way all around the edges, and see where they were supposed to fit in, but for the most part we can not actually see them.’³⁵ Nonetheless, there is a great deal of evidence from late antique Gaul that can help us map these edges and even peer into the middle. Since different genres give us quite different perspectives, the result is a somewhat piecemeal portrait of lay religious worlds. Rather than generalize, simplify or smooth out these differences, I have chosen to explore them. Each chapter focuses on particular questions, and on the genres that can help us to answer those questions. Sometimes the evidence reveals the category ‘lay’ in the process of formation and use; sometimes the evidence helps us to see beyond the category to the lay people; sometimes it is possible to discuss these strands together. The final picture that emerges is not exhaustive, and not completely coherent. That is the point. Our sources do not create a singular picture for us. From this we can conclude that the lay religious experience was very far from singular, but also that the picture of the laity being formed by clergy and ascetics in their texts could vary just as much.

Although most of my evidence was produced by clergy, or by ascetic elites, it was not therefore self-contained. The texts were produced within a culture that took seriously the ideal of Christian sermo humilis, or humble speech. As Averil Cameron has noted, the inclusivity of Christianity was one of its major strengths, and authors were aware of this, able and willing to exploit the opportunity created.³⁶ If the faith was to spread, if people were to be convinced, if their souls were to be saved, if God’s plans were to play out, then the message needed to go to all Christians. The result was a ‘Christian populism, that flouted the culture of the governing classes and claimed to have brought, instead, simple words, endowed with divine authority, to the masses of the empire’.³⁷ Even highly educated men, engaged at times in elaborate literary references, intertextual allusions or in-jokes, therefore self-consciously stressed, where appropriate, the simplicity and accessibility of their words. Jean-Michel Carrié has described this as a form of democratization from above, as elites worked hard to communicate complex Christian intellectual traditions to the masses of the faithful.³⁸ However, it went both ways – the worlds of elites were as shaped by these forces as the worlds of the laity – and Maxwell talks of democratization ascending and descending.³⁹ Because late antique authors absorbed the ideal that Christian culture should be shared and accessible to all the faithful, their texts were seldom wholly self-referential. The laity were present in many of them, as audiences, subjects, backgrounds or rhetorical constructs. My job is to look for the presence of the laity in whatever form it takes. From there I can decide how to interpret or approach the evidence.

I proceed on the principle that every text examined in this book had a communicative function. Some were forms of horizontal communication, between approximate peers, whereas others were vertical, between people who represented themselves as of different status.⁴⁰ Either way, they were acts in which intercommunication was essential. The author was required to imagine the audience, and to write with their reception in mind. The audience therefore played a role in shaping the text, along with the author. This emphasis on communication ensured that texts were central to Christian communities even though most members of the laity would not have been able to read them.⁴¹ Julia Smith has emphasized the high degree of ‘participatory literacy’ in the early middle ages, with people having access to texts in a variety of ways other than reading them directly.⁴² Christians did not have to be able to read in order to be acquainted with the scriptures, with exegesis, with the stories about saints’ lives and their miracles, or even with church council rulings. All of these were made available orally – scriptures were read in church and their interpretation expounded in sermons, stories about saints and their achievements formed part of their festivals, and church council rulings that affected communities appear to have been announced in public.⁴³ Scholars of literacy now argue, indeed, that we need to move away from a narrow focus on the ability to read or write, and to think instead about ‘literacy events’ and ‘communicative practices’, which privilege ‘study of socio-cultural practices over the emphasis on a specific technology or medium’.⁴⁴ Most of the texts examined in this book operated within such an environment. Although some of them were expressed in formal language, it was a version of the same language that lay people spoke – Latin only became incomprehensible to the uneducated after the pronunciation and orthographical reforms of the Carolingians.⁴⁵ Therefore, even those texts that were not produced by lay people can be used to understand their religious experiences. They formed part of the environment in which lay people operated, and many were designed as acts of communication with lay people. Our evidence is not ideal, but we can and must work with what we have.

Records of the Gallic church councils

The church council records represent an invaluable resource for the history of the Gallic church in this period – no other area in the West can compare with Gaul for the scope and chronological range of the records that survive.⁴⁶ On the face of it, however, they have relatively little to say either to or about the laity. The laity are seldom the main focus of conciliar concern and numerous aspects of their lives or religious activities provoke no anxiety or legislative action. Instead, the attention of the canon authors is fixed squarely upon the clergy, with secondary glances paid to professional ascetics. Nonetheless, the church council records give us two types of evidence about the religious worlds of the laity. First, canon authors used the laity as a negative contradistinction to establish clerical identity and proper behaviour. They therefore show us how certain clergy forged, used and manipulated the category of ‘lay’ for their own ends. They also reveal how canon authors fit ascetics and other complicating groups into their otherwise bipartite division of the church into clergy and laity. Second, the canons do include the occasional ruling that demonstrates what kinds of behaviours they expected from the laity, and what kinds of problems lay people posed for them. More can be made of this than has been so far.

Part of the reason why this evidence has been relatively neglected is that the church council records present a number of challenges to interpretation and understanding. Although they represent a clerical perspective, it is not always clear whose perspective we are getting.⁴⁷ Councils were not regularly spaced over time or between regions, and attendance might be limited by political considerations or shifting territorial boundaries. There were many different types of councils, convened for different reasons, which makes it difficult to generalize about them.⁴⁸ Nor is the textual record uncomplicated.⁴⁹ These were legalistic, idealized texts, attempting to forge institutions and identities, not snapshots of the Gallic church. Their canons were frequently repeated from previous councils, which raises the suspicion that they reiterated concerns or rulings more for reasons of tradition than because of responsiveness to actual problems. These issues have proved daunting to scholars.

However, none of them are insurmountable, and others even increase the interesting character of the records as historical sources. Even though they are legalistic in nature, the church council records were practical responses to the situation of the church in Gaul.⁵⁰ They both reveal divisions in practice and constitute attempts to draw those lines where they might not have existed before. The canons do not represent the perspective of any single individual, but of a very large and constantly changing group over a long period of time and spread across all of Gaul. The practice of collecting canons also testifies to the spread and influence of these rulings and the ideas encoded within them.⁵¹ The conclusions that emerge, contradictory though they may be, therefore reflect a much broader and more representative perspective than most texts could ever manage. Finally, the conservatism and repetition of the church council records was far from automatic. Each repetition was based on a revealing choice, as was each omission.⁵² I will chiefly use them to explore the clerical perspective on the laity and how they described and deployed the category of ‘lay’ in the process of their own clerical self-definition.

Secular legal sources

Secular legal sources are a valuable supplement to church council rulings. They contain less information about the laity as a religious category, but do provide information on the relations of lay people with religious institutions. In particular, they reveal a wide variety of people who were deemed to be ‘of the church’ but not clergy, indicating the grey zone between categories. The secular legal sources also indicate the range of ways in which the laity either supported the church and its clergy, or attempted to involve themselves in ecclesiastical activities. Moreover, the law codes that determined the legal framework for early medieval Gaul were commissioned by lay people – the barbarian kings – and despite the probable influence of religious institutions and scribal practices upon their production, they represent a different perspective on the situation of the Christian laity.

The picture that they provide, however, is far from coherent. The inhabitants of post-Roman Gaul engaged with a number of different law codes, depending on their location and perhaps also their identity.⁵³ The Visigoths produced two law codes for the regions under their control. One produced by Euric in around 481, the Codex Euriciani, was intended to apply to Goths. The other was the Lex Romana Visigothorum, also known as the Breviarum Alarici, produced in 506, which consisted of a summary of parts of the Theodosian Code and was intended to apply to Gallo-Romans.⁵⁴ The duplication of law codes can also be seen in Burgundian law production. They produced for their Burgundian population the Lex Burgundionum or Lex Gundobada in the late fifth/early sixth century, but also, in around 500, the Lex Romana Burgundionum for the Romans of the region.⁵⁵ When the Franks gained control of these areas, they complicated the picture still further – they kept the Lex Romana Visigothorum in the areas where it had applied, but continued also to allow Burgundian subjects to claim access to the Lex Burgundionum. Furthermore, they added to the mix, possibly as early as Clovis, the Pactus legis Salicae, a supposed compilation of the laws of the Franks, and the Lex Ribuaria, perhaps in the seventh century.⁵⁶ Finally, I have also considered, where relevant, the evidence from two mid-eighth-century law codes, the Lex Alamannorum and the Leges Baiuwariorum, from communities interacting with the Franks.⁵⁷ All of these law codes contain some rulings of relevance to the religious environments of lay people, but serious questions remain about how and where they may have applied in practice. I will draw on them on occasion to point out where their evidence either supports that of other texts, or looks interestingly divergent.

Different questions and opportunities emerge with the formularies – collections of legal models that appear to have been widely used in the later Merovingian and into the Carolingian periods. Of particular interest for this project are the Formulae Andecauenses, dating probably from the sixth or seventh century, and the very popular and influential Formulae Marculfi, which has been dated to the late seventh century.⁵⁸ These were based on real cases, and often involved lay people, including those of relatively low status.⁵⁹ They reveal a world of lay crimes against church property, problems in joining the clergy or a monastery, legal complications around donations, and careful maintenance of relations between religious and secular authorities. However, in the process of compilation they were stripped of details and specifics, to make them generically applicable. This is frustrating, but does give them a ‘broad applicability’, and means that they represent ‘a certain accepted way of doing things’, as Alice Rio has put it.⁶⁰ They are an underexploited genre and offer a number of intriguing glimpses of the worlds in which lay people operated.

Hagiographies and miracle stories

Much more scholarly ink has been spilt on hagiography and on the related genre of miracle collections and these emerge frequently in discussions of lay religiosity and popular culture.⁶¹ A relatively large number of saints’ lives survive from late antique Gaul, and although their heroes are usually clergy, or dedicated ascetics, their subjects often start out as lay, and have important interactions with lay people in the course of their adventures. Furthermore, these texts possess the rare advantage that they sometimes focus on female subjects or even boast female authors. Since the evidence is otherwise overwhelmingly dominated by male perspectives, I have focused in particular on the evidence provided by these texts. It is important to be cautious in using them, however, since some lives of late antique saints were written in the Carolingian period or even later. Although these may be based on earlier traditions, it is often difficult to disentangle the layers and stages of authorship. I have therefore avoided relying too heavily on those texts whose dating appears to be later or is uncertain. Many hagiographies contain miracle stories in which the laity also figure in large numbers, as the recipients of saintly assistance or admonition. These stories developed into a genre of their own, especially in the hands of Gregory of Tours. Miracle stories seem to evoke a world in which lay people were constantly exposed to and engaged with saintly power, even if they did not always show it due respect. Miracle stories appear, therefore, as invaluable sources of information about lay religious behaviours and beliefs.

Scholars now routinely observe the ways in which these texts were not only fictionalized but thoroughly manipulated and manipulative. They were embedded in the efforts of their authors to promote themselves, their institutions or the cult of a particular saint, while the lay people in them usually took on one of a narrow range of set roles. Yet as Ian Wood has pointed out, the authors and audiences of these texts belonged to the same community of belief.⁶² This makes hagiographies and miracle stories part of the religious world in which the laity shared.⁶³ Furthermore, Marieke Van Acker has recently argued that the language of Merovingian hagiographies was designed to be comprehensible to non-elite lay audiences, and that these were indeed read aloud in churches and widely understood.⁶⁴ The authors of these works, she emphasizes, were not intellectuals isolated from the common people.⁶⁵ At the very least, therefore, these texts can help us perceive what their authors saw as models of lay behaviour, and as examples of problematic lay misbehaviour. We can see what kinds of ideas were being expressed to the laity about their proper role in Christian society, even if we cannot easily perceive how the laity received or responded to these.

However, it is possible to go beyond this. These texts are full of indirect evidence for lay religiosity. By this I mean evidence which is not explicitly setting out an idea of lay piety, or attacking lay misbehaviour, but in which the laity appeared in a manner incidental to the main purpose of the text or the story.⁶⁶ Saints and miracles both need to be set within a plausible normality.⁶⁷ The scholar can therefore, with due caution, treat the contextual elements in these stories as portraits of possible lay behaviour. In other words, pay close attention to the lay people who seem to be part of the furniture. These are the glimpses of ordinary lay religious activity that provide the normal setting for the extraordinary worlds of the saints.

Sermons

On the face of it, sermons are a more straightforward source of evidence for the lay religious environment.⁶⁸ Many of these were aimed directly and explicitly at lay people and contained detailed descriptions and denunciations of the behaviour of their audiences. They have therefore been repeatedly acclaimed as expressions of lay–clerical interaction.⁶⁹ We can glimpse, in sermons, the world to which preachers felt compelled to respond: problematic lay religiosity, apathy, and alternative interpretations. We can also use sermons to assess what the clergy told lay people: what information they were given, and what behavioural expectations were laid out. But perhaps most importantly, because of their directly communicative function, sermons show us, more than any other text, democratization ascending and descending.⁷⁰ Preachers had to respond to audience needs, had to shape their style of address to suit the audience, and can be seen wrestling with the reception of their words.⁷¹ The laity were more immediately present in sermons than in any other genre of clerically produced literature.

As many scholars recognize, however, sermons require as much careful analysis and contextualization as any other late antique or early medieval text. In the process of engaging their audience, preachers were also shaping and manipulating them. They represented misbehaviours as pagan, in order to depict them as clearly beyond the pale. They decried widespread violation of ethical rules, in order to add drama and pathos to their denunciations, using Biblical models of themselves as prophets addressing sinful communities. They shaped lay concerns and anxieties into easily answerable questions, and they presented idealized portraits of lay engagement and deference, when that suited them. Furthermore, most sermons from this period survive as part of collections. This means that by the time we encounter them, they have already been edited, stripped of some detail, rendered generic and universally applicable. What we read, when we read Gallic sermons, are ‘approved versions’ – they provide a generalized picture of lay–clerical interactions, rather than specific ones. This does not decrease their value, it simply changes the nature of the evidence we have, and scholars need to be very aware of this when using them.

For this study, I focus in particular on two collections of sermons from late antique Gaul: the 238 sermons attributed to Caesarius of Arles and the 76 sermons now known as the Eusebius Gallicanus collection.⁷² These sermons were written in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, but were widely used after this time and survive now in hundreds of manuscripts, testifying to their popularity and influence as preaching models.⁷³ They therefore represent forms of preaching to which many lay people in Gaul would have been exposed. Furthermore, although they have much in common, they represent interestingly different pastoral styles. Comparison of their evidence therefore provides us with a complex picture of lay–clerical interactions in late antique and early medieval Gaul.

Epitaphs

A form of evidence which offers us a chance of escaping the clerical-ascetic perspective is epitaphs – one of the few ways in which the laity represent themselves to us in a context that touches upon religion.⁷⁴ They give us an invaluable glimpse of lay piety, as lay people were praised for their particular religious virtues, or commendable religious behaviours, and they give us some sense of what aspects of religious belief were most comforting to lay people faced with bereavement. As with all sources, however, we need to be aware of their limitations.⁷⁵ In particular, scholars do not agree on how far down the social scale the epigraphic habit extended in late antiquity.⁷⁶ Where professions were given, individuals largely appeared to be of high status, although those of low status were less likely to boast of their roles in life.⁷⁷ What does seem clear is that only those with some disposable income to spend on commemoration, or who were part of an institution such as a church or monastery, were able to afford inscriptions. However, the quality of surviving examples indicates that there was wide variation even within this group.⁷⁸ Inscriptions were not, moreover, the sole preserve of the literate.⁷⁹ Although they do not give us the full social range, they provide access to ‘a much larger sampling of people’ than our limited literary evidence.⁸⁰ We can hear in inscriptions reflections of the lives of deacons and sub-deacons, religious women of various stripes, merchants, queens, even a door-keeper. These are not people from whom we often hear, so it is worth listening when the chance arises.

This leads into a further problem with inscriptions, however, in that epitaphs only rarely represent the planned words of the deceased person they describe. We cannot necessarily therefore assume that the epitaph of a merchant reflects a merchant’s piety. Furthermore, it is usually impossible to determine whether the repetitive pious phrases that adorned grave markers reflected the worldviews even of the family or other survivors who erected them, or whether they represented the expected formulations provided by the professional workshops that engraved them.⁸¹ Nonetheless, we can at least note how the laity were described on their gravestones, or how they were happy to have others describe them. This in itself is interesting, and gives us a different perspective on how the laity saw themselves and their role within the Gallic church.

Although hundreds of Christian epitaphs survive from late antique and early medieval Gaul, the history of their publication has been patchy and scattered. LeBlant’s 1856 edition has been important but it is now recognized as incomplete and on occasion inaccurate.⁸² It has been supplemented by a number of subsequent publications, invaluably summarized by Mark Handley, and is in the process of being superseded by the Recueil des inscriptions chrétiennes de la Gaule series.⁸³ This series is excellent, but so far only three of the planned twelve volumes have appeared, covering the provinces of Belgica I, Aquitania I and Vienne. Under these circumstances, I have not attempted an exhaustive survey of the epigraphic evidence, an important task that would have considerably altered the focus of this study. Instead, I have examined a sample of the surviving epitaphs, mostly those which are now well edited, to give a sense of their content and the kind of picture they provide. Even this limited exercise has revealed a wealth of fascinating material and perspectives and I hope that this will provide an impetus for future work.

Material evidence

The final important source for this study is material evidence. Physical environments were the basic site of lay religious experience, and a number of scholars who have explored lay religiosity have seen environments as the most appropriate means of approaching the topic.⁸⁴ Domestic spaces would have been primary sites of lay religious action. These spaces, however, are largely invisible to us in Gaul.⁸⁵ Instead, when we talk about the physical elements of the religious environment in Gaul, we are mostly talking about urban topography, which has been extensively mapped, the architecture of churches and other sacred sites, which is now being explored and, to a lesser extent, the images, furnishings and objects that filled those spaces, or had religious meaning to lay Christians. This means that even our material evidence is dominated by clerical and other elite perspectives. Most Christians had little say in how their cities were laid out, where their churches were placed, what form they took and what images adorned them. However, they did have a say in how those spaces were used, and in how those images and furnishings were understood. Our material evidence is still shaped and manipulated, but it does not, and cannot, give the same message as a literary text. By examining this evidence, we can get some sense of how religion entered into the lives of lay Christians at a very basic level, and we get some glimpses of what it may have meant to them. All evidence is gold.

Chapter breakdown

This is far from being a thorough survey of the evidence that could be used to examine the lay religious experience, or even a complete list of the genres studied in this book. Letters, penitentials, histories, treatises, monastic rules and poems will also be brought into the mix when applicable. However, this book makes no claim to be an exhaustive survey of the laity in late antique Gaul: it is a series of case studies, focusing on different aspects of their religious worlds. This approach prioritizes in-depth analysis of particular issues or sources over a more complete but necessarily shallower survey. The book begins in Chapter 1 by laying out the contemporary conceptual framework, looking at how different authors and genres defined the laity, as well as the contrastive definitions of clergy and ascetics. It makes clear that although ‘lay’ was an important category in religious thought, its exact meaning and implications could vary. Furthermore, there was a large ‘grey zone’ of people who did not fit neatly into any of these religious divisions and who complicated the expectations the Christian church had for its lay members. After this conceptual discussion, Chapter 2 moves on to the physical framework, summarizing what we know about the spatial worlds of the late antique laity: their city-scapes, churches and religious landscapes. This is followed in Chapter 3 by case studies of a sample of Gallic cities, to establish in-depth portraits of particular environments. These varied widely – there was no uniform religious experience for Gallic laity, and an enormous amount depended on the specific circumstances of their local worlds. Chapter 4 explores the religious rituals that took place in these religious spaces, most especially the Eucharistic mass and liturgical processions. It details what we know about how the laity were involved in these and how they interacted with them. Chapter 5 shifts focus to the religious behaviour of the laity outside these formal occasions, both in terms of what ideals and expectations the clergy had of them, and how they may have related to those. Finally, Chapter 6 tackles the thorny issue of what the laity may have known about Christianity and what they may have believed. These are difficult issues to engage with, but there is enough evidence to suggest that both knowledge and belief were central concerns for clergy and laity alike in late antique Gaul.

The picture that emerges is one of diversity. Clergy, ascetics and laity interacted in a variety of different ways and their religious worlds were shaped by the specificities of place, situation and need. Some clergy and ascetics demeaned ‘worldly’ forms of Christianity in order to elevate themselves and their roles, but others were deeply engaged with lay experiences and pastoral care. Moreover, the laity had far more agency than the ‘negative trajectory’ allows. Even the limited evidence we have suggests that they could interact with church institutions and ecclesiastical figures on their own terms. Their worlds are worth exploring.