Gregory the Great has been called, with some justice, “the last ancient man.” In the century which followed his death – the seventh century – the Christian world changed dramatically. In the Middle East, a new world religion was born only a few decades after the death of Gregory – Islam. The consequent Arab conquests marked the end of the ancient world order in the Middle East and in North Africa. Equally important, for western Europe, was the emergence of a new cultural zone in northwestern Europe, in the Frankish kingdom of northern Gaul, in Ireland, and in Saxon Britain. Gregory could not have been aware that, while he was pope in Rome, a distant Arab – the prophet Muhammad, already a man of 30 – would begin to seek God in the mountains of the Hijâz. Nor could he have foreseen the long-term consequences of two events of which he was aware: one was the arrival in northern Gaul of the vivid Irishman, Columbanus, which took place in 590, the year in which he himself became pope, and the other was the mission which he himself sent, in 597, to the pagan Saxons of Kent. We will deal with these two sets of events – the rise of Islam in the Middle East and the creation of a new religious culture in northwestern Europe – in subsequent chapters (in chapters 12 and 13 for the Middle East, and in chapters 14 and 15 for the British Isles). Taken together, these two very different and unrelated sets of changes, which took place at the two furthest ends of the existing Christian world, in Ireland and in Arabia, changed forever the face of Christendom. The seventh century, and not the inconclusive political crisis that we call the “barbarian invasions” of the fifth century, witnessed the true break between the ancient world and what followed.
But a religious culture does not change only under the impact of dramatic crises. It also changes slowly and surely over the centuries within itself and under its own momentum. These changes had already begun in western Europe in the sixth century, before the days of Gregory the Great. The most important of these changes was that monasticism began to take on a different profile. It became notably more prominent within the Christian Church. In significant parts of Europe, it changed its function in a manner that came to look straight forward to the great monasteries of the Middle Ages. Secular Latin culture also changed greatly, in the course of the sixth century, in the former Roman territories of Continental Europe. In the non-Roman areas of Ireland and western Britain, it took on an entirely new form. Finally, the intervention of Columbanus and his Irish monks (who were very much the products of the new form of Christian Latin culture developed in Ireland) acted as a catalyst for changes which had already been under way for a century. Northern Gaul was transformed as a result. These three changes will be the subject of this and the next two chapters. In this chapter, I will describe the changing role of monasticism, then (in chapter 10) I will deal with the changing meaning of secular culture in Continental Europe and in the British Isles, and last of all (in chapter 11) with the impact of Columbanus on the northern Frankish kingdom, and with the consequent emergence of a new style of Christian piety.
It is important to linger on these three developments. The seventh century appears to us to be something of a trough in the overall development of European civilization. It is awkwardly placed between the last centuries of the ancient world and the creation of a new world, which we associate with the age of Charlemagne and with what we tend to call (whether rightly or wrongly, we shall see) “the Carolingian Renaissance.” We tend to hurry through the intervening centuries, which stretch between the fall of Rome and the Carolingian empire.
By doing this, we overlook the fact that the late sixth and seventh centuries were truly seminal. Between A.D. 550 and 650, western Christianity finally took on the face which it would wear throughout the Middle Ages and into modern times. “Our” Christianity was created in the seventh century and not before. Not only did Christian institutions change, with the rise of impressive monasteries. Issues which had not greatly concerned Christians of former centuries (or which had concerned them in an entirely different manner) came to take on new prominence.
This mutation did not involve a change in doctrine. It was based, rather, on a profound change in the imagination. The result was nothing less than a new view of sin, of atonement, and of the other world, which, in turn, laid the basis for a distinctive notion of the individual person and of his or her fate after death. These remained central concerns of western Christianity up to the Reformation and beyond. On these issues, western Christians of around the year 700 had begun to think and to feel in a manner that made them closer to us than they were to western Christians of an earlier time. For this to happen, the imaginative patterns of a very ancient, Mediterranean Christianity had to lose their grip. The process which we will follow in these chapters, therefore, amounted to nothing less than what has been described as “The End of Ancient Christianity.”1
By the year 600, at least 220 monasteries and convents existed in Gaul.2 In Italy, we have records of around 100.3 With few exceptions, monasteries still clung to the contours of a very ancient world. In Gaul and Spain, they clustered close to the Mediterranean, in the former, highly Romanized areas of the south. They were associated with the former Roman cities. Convents of nuns gathered (in part for protection) within the city walls. Monasteries of monks tended to be suburban. Monasteries were often associated with the great shrines which had grown up in the cemetery areas outside the city walls. Both convents and monasteries lived under the shadow of the urban bishops. It was the bishop who protected and supervised them. Bishops were often the most zealous founders of monasteries.4
Altogether, monasteries and convents were thought of as adjuncts to the religious life of the cities. Compared with the impressive basilica churches and shrines that had been built in and around the cities in the past two centuries, monasteries and convents were inconspicuous. Many were converted town-houses (as was the monastery of Gregory the Great on the Caelian Hill) or re-adapted farmsteads.
This was true even in Italy, where the abrupt distinction between the rich plains of Rome and Naples and the wild hills that jutted out from the central mountain spine of the Apennines made many monasteries seem as remote and unearthly as if they were perched in the middle of the Egyptian desert. But this was not the case. The city was always close to hand. Benedict’s first monastery at Subiaco was hidden in a cliff-face, in the midst of steep, heavily wooded ridges. But it was only 50 miles from Rome. The name, Subiaco, from Sub Lacum, “below the lake,” was derived from the artificial lake of a large, nearby villa, which had been built by none other than the emperor Nero as a summer retreat from the heat of Rome. Benedict’s final and more famous monastery, Monte Cassino, was on a wild hilltop; but it looked down over the main road that linked Rome to the Bay of Naples.
What an early sixth-century visitor to Monte Cassino would have encountered was not the “city set upon a hill” that it later became. A chapel of 7.60 by 15.25 meters (the size of a village church) would have stood on the site of a ruined temple, surrounded by what would have looked like a complex of small farmhouses. By the eleventh century, this church had become a major basilica (of 46.2 by 19 meters) and the hilltop was covered, like a fortress, with large stone buildings.5 Cassiodorus’ Vivarium, founded on a major estate close to his native city of Squillace, was exceptionally grand. It was not the average monastery, either in its economic security or in its scholarly activities. We often glimpse tiny establishments. At Luni (on the Ligurian coast, near the marble quarries of Carrara) we know, from a letter of Gregory I, that a monastery – to which he gave his approval – consisted of no more than a house with ten beds and two oxen together with two slaves to do the ploughing.6 Most monasteries were poor. Benedict insisted that his monasteries should attempt to be self-supporting.7 But this ideal was seldom realized. Monks usually shared in the general poverty of their region. They were as vulnerable to shortages as were any other small farmers. Frequently, they had to be bailed out by pious lay persons. By the time of Benedict, alms “for the poor” often meant, not alms for the local beggars, but contributions to the “poor” monks of the local monastery.8
We should not think of early sixth-century monks as great landowners. Many monasteries were established on marginal lands. Only in such a way could the monks be given land without cutting into the neighborhood’s limited pool of good arable land. We see this happening in Spain. Monks in monasteries in Galicia, on the edge of the Pyrenees, found that they had to abandon the life of a gentleman farmer. It was not enough to grow grain in the valley. Like it or not, they must take to the wild hills as shepherds. The abbot explained that
most monasteries would scarcely have enough food for three months if there was only the daily bread of the region to eat, which requires more work on the soil than in any other part of the country.
He added that they should console themselves by remembering that the Patriarchs Abraham and Jacob had also herded sheep!9 Altogether, monasteries in western Europe had not yet become places whose occupants enjoyed the same degree of prestige as did their colleagues in Egypt and Syria.
It is important to stress the relatively low-profile quality of early western monasticism. Monks did not yet enjoy the high status of a holy caste, totally separate from the laity, which they enjoyed in later centuries. Rather, monks, nuns, and lay persons found that they had much in common with each other compared to the bishop and his clergy. For monks and nuns were an awkward, “amphibious” group. They were neither lay persons nor clerics. They were plainly different from the laity. On entering the monastery, they had solemnly abandoned all claims on their private property. They could not marry and rear families. They wore ostentatiously nondescript, “religious” dress. But few monks were ordained, and, as women, no nuns were. They were a singularly colorless group. They stood between a laity, where differences of status (particularly in the upper classes) were asserted vehemently – through dress, gesture, and tone of voice – and often defended with violence, and a clergy which was also arranged in a clear hierarchy, due to the right of the bishop to ordain priests and other, lesser members of the clergy, and whose public role in the cities was undisputed.
Yet the laity plainly needed monks and nuns and wanted them to stand out as special in a way that they did not expect the clergy to be. The pressure on monks to be special is shown by small but significant changes. By the middle of the sixth century, the monastic tonsure came to be introduced in many regions. “Tonsure” (from the Latin tondere, to cut short or shave) became a clear statement of the separation of the monk from the lay world. It involved cutting the hair on the top of the head. This was an almost folkloristic ritual, chosen from a pool of lay practices that had always treated hair as significant. How hair was grown and how it was cut carried an instant social message. Romans expected teenage boys to dedicate their first beard at a temple. Christian Romans continued the practice at martyrs’ shrines. “Barbarians” regarded the forcible cutting of hair as an assault on their honor. So the tonsure emerged, quietly and without theorizing, as a sign that, on admission to the monastery, the monk was both consecrated to God and humbled, by the loss of his hair, beneath the rule of the abbot. It was a ritual worked out between the monks themselves and a laity who wished them to look different in a way that everyone would understand.10
For the laity had also begun, at this time, to offer their children at an early age to monasteries and convents. Child nuns could be offered as early as six, little monks at the age of ten. These children had been “offered” to God and to the monastery – hence the term “oblate” from the Latin oblatus, “offered.” They had some freedom to choose whether they would remain in the monastery when they grew older. But it was not a freedom that many dared to exercise against the wishes of their family. Most oblates remained in the monastery to which they had been given.
The growth of the practice of “oblation,” along with the emergence of the tonsure, shows the extent to which the laity treated monasteries as an adjunct to their own piety. Based on appeals to the Old Testament story of how Hannah (previously childless) had dedicated her first-born, Samuel, to the temple, the vowing of children was a regular practice for those afflicted by infertility or illness. Like any other product of nature, children were the gift of God quite as much as was any good harvest. Why, then, should children not be offered to God much as the “fruits of the earth” were offered? Children were offered as a counter-gift to God for the fertility which he had bestowed on human bodies in the same way as he had bestowed fertility on the fields.11 More cynically, of course, parents frequently used monasteries and convents as depositaries for unwanted children – and especially for girls, who required dowries if they were to be married.12
Tonsure made the monk look distinctive. The practice of “oblation” ensured that children often grew up in monasteries, totally sheathed in a distinctive, monastic culture. Both practices seemed to make the monks more separate from the lay world. Yet this is only half of the story. Both practices showed that monasteries depended on a tacit symbiosis with the laity. They adopted lay rituals and they accepted recruits in a way that fed into the reproductive and marital strategies of their lay neighbors.
This means that monasteries and convents should not be seen as totally enclosed communities. Rather, they followed with unusual sensitivity the shifts of Christian piety in the world around them. It was lay persons who wished to join monasteries and convents or to offer their children to them in fulfillment of vows. It was lay persons who wished to stay close to them so as to benefit from the example, the prayers, and the spiritual advice of their inmates. It was, above all, lay persons who came increasingly to wish to endow and protect them, even if they did not themselves become monks or nuns. What was demanded of monasteries and convents throughout this period did not change only as a result of the work of bishops and of monastic organizers. The demands changed as a result of the constant, mute pressure of lay expectations.
First and foremost, lay persons agreed that monasteries were there to deal with sin. This is shown very clearly in a letter which Gregory I wrote to the emperor Maurice in 593. Drained by his wars with Persia, the emperor desperately needed manpower for his armies. As a result he issued an edict which forbade persons liable to military service to become monks. Gregory protested immediately. Surely the emperor must realize, he wrote, that such a law was intolerable: “for there are many persons who, unless they abandon all [and enter a monastery] cannot gain salvation in the sight of God.”13 Lay persons were, of course, capable of salvation. But monasteries existed for the exceptional cases. They gave freedom to those called to a sharper, more exacting style of Christian life. They sheltered sensitive souls in love with God, as Gregory himself had been. But they also existed for the amelioration of sinners. Many sinners needed “conversion.” For sixth-century Christians, indeed, “conversion” had come to mean not a change of belief but a change of life. It meant joining a monastery so as to “purge” one’s sins.
The Rule composed by Benedict for his monks at Monte Cassino owed its later influence to the manner in which he assumed that, as converted sinners, monks needed to begin with the basics. Monte Cassino was not expected to be a “Paradise regained” in an unearthly desert, as in the heroic days of the monks of Egypt. In Benedict’s opinion, these days were long passed.14 What Italian monks of the early sixth century needed was a Rule “for beginners.” His monastery was to be a “school of the Lord’s service.”15 It was an elementary school. Upper-class persons, who had attended such schools, knew what this meant. As boys, they had struggled to internalize the crystalline precision of “correct” Latin under the cane of a schoolmaster. Now, in a monastery, as grown men, they were expected to go back to a school of morals which was as exacting, in its own way, as any Roman school. They were to subject their behavior to meticulous supervision, accompanied, when necessary, by instant punishment – blows from the strap included.
In an intensely status-conscious society, the most heroic self-mortification of all for a monk was to submit himself, in this manner, to the rule of an abbot. Gregory I tells the story of the son of a local notable who found himself, as a monk, standing behind Benedict, his abbot, holding the lamp while Benedict sat dining:
“Who is this,” he thought to himself, “that I should have to stand here holding the lamp for him while he is eating? Who am I to be acting as his slave?”16
Hence, the extreme sensitivity which Benedict showed to the issue of blotting out social differences. This was achieved, in the first place, by an utterly uniform code of dress. These were to be cheap reach-me-downs, bought in the local market. Thus, the cowl and robe of medieval monks, which plays so large a part in modern romantic visions of the Middle Ages, began as the sixth-century equivalent of a farmer’s blue jeans.17
Seen from the outside, monasteries were like the slave households to which Romans would long have been accustomed. All monks were equal because all were placed under the fatherly but absolute control of their abbot. Monasteries were small places of intense discipline, carved out against the grain of normal social relations in a late Roman society. They were maintained by innumerable, hard-won victories over the self on the part of former free men.
Throughout the Christian world pious monks and nuns had always enjoyed a reputation for possessing the power of prayer. It was believed that such persons could pray to God on behalf of their fellow-Christians. As we saw in chapter 7, the importance of holy men and holy women in East Roman society depended on the belief that they possessed an unusual capacity to move God by their prayers. They were constantly asked to intercede on behalf of their lay clients.
What changed in the West, in the course of the sixth century, was the emergence of the belief that entire convents and monasteries possessed a collective power of prayer that was somehow stronger than the prayers offered by any one holy person. It is a subtle but decisive shift. Convents and monasteries came to be seen as more than sheltered places where individuals sought holiness. They were treated as holy places in themselves. A well-organized monastery could function as a powerhouse of prayer on behalf of the community as a whole. Hence the growing importance placed, in monastic rules all over Europe, on those qualities which rendered the community gathered in a monastery or convent capable of collective holiness and, hence, of effective collective prayer.18
We can see this development most clearly in Gaul. It first affected women. Nuns rather than monks led the way.19 This in itself is significant, for the need for a powerhouse of prayer made up of women placed the greatest weight of expectations on those who, in many ways, were closest to the lay world. Women could never be priests. Given the prevalence of rape and violence in a countryside frequently ravaged by warfare, women could not seek out a “desert” for themselves in the hills and woodlands of Italy and Gaul. They had to stay close to town. All over the Christian world, women’s monasticism had begun very much as a branch of family piety. A pious household would be proud to have “its” virgin. She would be secluded in the back of the house. She would be visible only as she proceeded (with due modesty) to the local church and back, to join her “sisters in religion” in the local virgins’ choir. But it is precisely this enclosed and faceless quality which caused the virgin to be valued so highly, for it placed sanctity in the very heart of the profane world. The pious virgin was a human relic, encased in the midst of the city. Virginity brought a particularly charged form of the sacred and placed it alongside the profane world in a way that the more distant heroism of desert monks, the models of male monastic piety, could not hope to do.20
For virgin women carried their sanctity with them in an utterly tangible form. Their bodies were intact. They had not suffered the penetration of intercourse or the disruption of childbirth. While men had to work hard, through ascetic discipline, to present to the lay world reassuring physical signs of their holiness, a woman, as a virgin, was believed to carry an intact soul fully revealed through an intact body. The fact that this body had been left untouched seemed to show awesome self-control on the part of the woman (given late antique Mediterranean notions of the vulnerability of women to sexual temptation). In reality, it frequently did show very real heroism and determination on the part of the young girl: her wish not to marry was only too easily overridden by her parents. And, once the girl’s dedication as a nun took place, it showed something even weightier. It made visible the sheer will of an entire family and of the convent which the family patronized to say “hands off” to the world at large. A woman of their family, in “their” convent, had been made sacred and was not available to others.21
In reality, of course, a woman’s holiness was achieved through a Christian ascetic piety that did not differ greatly from that of monks. Pious women faced the same austerities. They engaged in the same struggle to overcome their own self-will. If they were girls from cultured families, they engaged in the same bouts of intense meditative reading as did any monk. Augustine’s monastic rule circulated at this time in two forms, with only the Latin gender switched, from masculine to feminine, according to whether it was intended for a monastery or for a convent.22 But the holiness of a woman nonetheless gave a different message to the lay world. It spoke with mute certainty, in a language that was understood since pagan times, through a miraculously intact body. It was from bodies charged with such associations that sixth-century persons thought that they could create the most effective powerhouses of prayer.
In 508, Caesarius of Arles (of whom we have already heard in chapter 6) set up a convent under his sister, Caesaria. The Rule which he composed for her in 512 became a classic.23 He brought together an unusually large group of women (200 in all) in a single convent of St. John. He deliberately placed this group in buildings that abutted the walls of the city itself. By their position beside the city walls, they were marked out as the spiritual protectors of Arles, at a time when the city was under constant danger of siege.24
Caesarius imposed total seclusion on the nuns. Once they entered the convent, they would never leave it. They had sought out, in the convent, “the cool refuge of chastity.”25 He then subjected every detail of their life to meticulous control. He even went so far as to sketch, in the manuscript of his Rule, the precise shape of the haircuts which the nuns should have.26 Such a community was well worth the care which Caesarius put into it. For what Caesarius had created, out of a pool of pious women gathered together by his sister, was nothing less than a “holy place” as effective as the shrine of any local saint. This was an environment where the “world” (and, it was hoped, even sin itself) stopped at the convent door.27
Caesaria’s nuns were recruited with care from the daughters of the elite. Like the virgin priestesses of Roman times, their purity was held to protect the city as a whole. Their unearthly seclusion and carefully paced life of prayer and reading made of them the Vestal Virgins of the new Christian city. The convent of St. John had something of the ancient holiness of a temple precinct about it. It was a precinct that must never be breached. When a fire broke out in the convent buildings, the nuns were remembered as having huddled together in the empty cistern that lay in the center of its courtyard until the flames died down, rather than abandon their seclusion by passing back through the door which led out into the city of Arles.28
Precisely because it stressed a stunning juxtaposition of the utterly sacred and the profane, a woman’s piety could act as a bridge between the new barbarian, military elites of northern Gaul and what had previously been a largely “Roman” form of religion, cultivated by the leisured and still largely civilian elites of the south. Impressive royal women had begun to do this early in the century. Queen Caratene, the estranged wife of king Chilperic II of the Burgundians, was praised both for her generosity to the poor and for a form of secret piety that was greatly valued at the time. She always wore a hair shirt beneath her royal robes.29 No practice signalled so effectively the intimate bringing together of the sacred and the profane. Beneath the embroidered robes of a public figure, the queen carried real flesh, mortified by ascetic discipline. Caratene brought a sliver of intense holiness into the midst of a hard-driving, largely military court.
The Burgundian kingdom had lain in the Rhône valley, close to Caesaria’s Arles. The woman who brought this style of piety to the Frankish society of northern Gaul came as an outsider from across the Rhine. Radegund (520–587) was a woman of royal stock from Thuringia.30 She had grown up as a Christian in a region far removed from the heavily Romanized Provence of Caratene, Caesarius, and Caesaria. She was brought to Francia in 532 as a young captive, after the destruction of her country, in order to become the unwilling wife of king Chlothar of Neustria. At that time, Chlothar controlled much of northwestern Gaul, around Soissons. In a new and hostile environment, the young teenager sheathed herself with an intense sense of the sacred. Isolated in a royal villa at Athies, near Soissons, Radegund would lovingly clean the chapel of the villa. She gathered up the dust from the altar “and reverently placed it outside the door, rather than sweep it away.” She would lead her companions in solemn processions, carrying a home-made wooden cross.31 During Lent, like queen Caratene, she wore a hair shirt (given to her by a holy nun) beneath her royal robes.32
Finally, Radegund shook herself free from her husband. In any case, she had only been, at best, the “chief wife” of Chlothar, who was exuberantly polygamous, as Merovingian kings were supposed to be. She forced the bishop of Noyon to accept her as a nun, by the simple expedient of dressing herself in the robes of a nun and advancing to the altar, demanding to be consecrated.33 In her new inviolate status, as a “dedicated” person, Radegund emerged as a gift-giver in truly royal style. For a Merovingian queen, robes, jewels, and great gold-studded belts were far more than mere ornaments. They were the physical condensation on her person of the magical aura of royalty. Radegund piled these on the altars of churches or chopped them up to be sent to local hermits, thereby transmuting them into “sacred” wealth offered by a “sacred” queen.34
Her austerities made her admirers shudder. Hers was a piety grounded on her own body. She was even said to have branded her arm with the sign of the Cross: “to cool her fervent soul, she sought to burn her body.”35 She brought her body into contact with all that was most loathsome to an upper-class person. She regularly bathed the poor, massaging with her own hands the scabby, worm-eaten heads of beggar-women.36 By such extremes of highly physical piety, she brought a touch of fierce holiness to the highest levels of society in Frankish Gaul.
When Radegund moved to Poitiers, in 561, to found a convent of her own, she placed it, like the convent of St. John at Arles, in a section of the city’s walls. She adopted for her nuns the Rule of Caesarius for Caesaria. Her convent was to be a similar holy place. She then did something which Caesaria had not done. She used her status as a member of the Christian “family of princes” to obtain nothing less than a relic of the Holy Cross itself, direct from the emperor of Constantinople. It was an altogether appropriate relic for such a woman to obtain. It linked Radegund to the memory of Constantine and of his mother, Helena, who was believed to have uncovered the true Cross at Jerusalem. In doing this, Radegund shrank time and distance: “What Helena had done in the East, Radegund did for Gaul.”37 The arrival of the True Cross at Poitiers brought a touch of international, East Roman piety into a Gaul which, up to then, had been largely devoted to the cult of local saints.
But the relic of the True Cross had a deeper and more personal significance for Radegund. Radegund was a queen, “a noble sprout from royal stock.”38 Had she remained “in the world,” she might have proved to be a “blossoming bough” whose fruit, in the form of children, upheld the Merovingian Frankish dynasty. Instead, she had allowed her potentially fertile body to become as dead and dry as was the dry, hard wood of the relic of the Cross. To a Christian poet who meditated on such things – none other than Venantius Fortunatus, summoned by Radegund to Poitiers to do justice to the occasion – the dry fragment of the Cross was the most fertile object in the world. For the Cross was the true Tree of Life, always blossoming and heavy with the fruit whose taste healed humankind.39 Radegund, the infertile queen, whose body had been rendered dry and hard by arduous austerities, was its most appropriate guardian. She and her nuns were the truly fertile ones, for they “carried Christ in the womb.”40
In many ways, Radegund’s convent of the Holy Cross looks forward to a new style of piety.41 The relic of the Cross was kept in a special chapel. This chapel lay at the heart of the monastery. In it were stored “those precious gems which Paradise holds and which Heaven hoards.”42 It was a treasure-house of holy things. And only Radegund, her nuns, and a few, chosen visitors were allowed to have access to it.
In the deliberate seclusion of the relic of the Holy Cross, we are dealing with an intensely focused sense of the holy, shielded from the world by virgin women. This was different from the old-fashioned holiness associated with the great urban shrines of Gaul. That had been a holiness where a touch of Paradise had been open to all. In Tours, and elsewhere, as we learn from Gregory of Tours, heaving crowds of men and women alike would stream in and out of the basilicas. They gathered in glorious disorder around the holy tombs, “like bees in full swarm.”43 This was not the case in the convent of the Holy Cross. Access to the holy was restricted. Because of this, the holiness associated with the convent seemed to be that much more vibrant and more awesome, as befitted a convent thought to be a powerhouse of prayer.
The delicate scent of a royal court lingered at Radegund’s Convent of the Holy Cross. She received courtly personal poems, accompanied by baskets of strawberries, from Venantius Fortunatus.44 A potted laurel stood in her cell. One of her nuns was delighted to recognize the sounds of a love song that she had composed in her youth, drifting through a window from a festival below.45
But the monastery had a serious purpose. At a time when a highly localized devotion to urban patron saints was the most usual form of Christian piety in Gaul, Radegund thought in “imperial” terms. Her prayers embraced the Frankish kingdom as a whole. She and her nuns were the spiritual guardians of that state and of the kings who struggled to control it.
She taught us all to pray incessantly for their stability … She imposed assiduous vigils on her flock, imploring them to pray incessantly for the kings.46
By the time that Radegund died, in 587, she had shown how intense, melodramatic piety practiced by the secluded few might act as a powerhouse of prayer to support the entire Frankish kingdom. In the largest and, in many ways, the wealthiest, political unit in western Europe, monasticism had become a fully public institution, identified with stability and political success.