An Alternative History of Post-Roman Gaul?

This is the first detailed study since the nineteenth century of the ‘Epistolae Arelatenses’, a Merovingian collection of 54 fifth- and sixth-century letters concerning Arles and its role between papal Rome, the Empire, and Gaul. Moving away from narrowly legalistic interpretations, it reframes the collection as a persuasive late sixth-century statement about the place of Arles and Gaul in the recent history of the Mediterranean world. Part I redates the collection to c. 590/595. Its compilers were working from the archives of Arles, selectively assembling documents for a libellus to support a royal petition for a major papal privilege reconnecting Arles – and with it, a partly estranged Merovingian church – to the imperial church of Rome. This was granted with much fanfare by Pope Gregory I in August 595. Part II then explores what we can learn by viewing the collection through the lens of its three contemporary audiences: ( 1 ) papal Rome ( which depended on the curatorship of external archivists and collectors to make sense of papal history and guide future policy ); ( 2 ) the Merovingian court of Childebert II ( which still needed convincing of Rome’s orthodoxy in the wake of the Three Chapters Controversy ); and ( 3 ) the city of Arles ( for whom the collection can be read as an expression of local historiographical traditions about late/post-Roman Gaul – an alternative, Mediterranean perspective from that offered by its contemporary, Gregory of Tours ).