La vie de sainte Radegonde par Fortunat: Poitiers, Bibliothèque municipale, manuscrit 250 (136)

by Venantius Honorius Fortunatus

French, Latin (translation)Original Latin

269 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1995

About the author

Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus (c.530–c.600/609) was a Latin poet and hymnodist in the Merovingian Court, and a Bishop of the early Catholic Church. He was never canonised but was venerated as Saint Venantius Fortunatus during the Middle Ages.

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

Sometimes I do wonder what on earth I am reading. I blame the internet. Specifically internet bookshops which allow you to build up a wish list of books. Then one day you buy a clutch of them and can't recall why they caught your fancy half a dozen years earlier. So it was in this case. I held the little book in my hand, turned it upside down, looked at it sideways and generally did what I could while standing on one leg to try and recover my original train of thought, which as far as I could tell had not only steamed off into the distance but there had derailed just before the boiler exploded, or something.

It was only once I opened the cover and flicked to the back of the book and started to read the notes a bout the author and Radegund herself that the train, no doubt through the glorious intervention of the saint herself, righted itself and pulled into the station with a jolly whistle. The train of thought carried me back to lounging in the front garden of the house of my now deceased great-aunt, from her decent book collection I had grabbed a likely tale of adventure it was a hardback with a blue dustjacket - in this case the author wanted to find the treasure horde of the last kings of Thuringia who were cruelly defeated by the Merovingians maybe in the year 531 or perhaps in 532 AD the Merovingians then laid down a crushing tribute to paid annually in pigs, the author was certain that if the French gave permission for him to fly, it was only the French as one of the four occupying powers in Germany who for some important reason that I no longer recall, were unkeen to grant permission for aerial photography in the region the author was sure the burial place could be spotted. Anyhow that's all by the by since I left my Great-Aunt's house without finishing the book, which in hindsight seems a curious thing for me to have done though the difficulty in visiting my Great-Aunt was that there generally was only coffee or beer to drink, so one was continually attempting to find a point of balance or intersection between not being thirsty, nor over-caffeinated, nor drunk. An interesting conundrum which I never entirely managed to solve to my satisfaction.

In any case Radegund was the niece of the last Thurginian king, Hermanafrid he died mysteriously when he was mysteriously pushed over the edge of a city wall, this Gregory of Tours felt was very mysterious, but, he says that some people claimed that the Mervoginian king might have had something to do with it, which just goes to show that wild political speculation is nothing new mind you, to be fair, even if you are a bishop, you probably don't want to annoy the kind of man who has people he doesn't like very much thrown over city wallsand was taken as part of the war plunder indeed that is pretty much the phrase Fortunatus uses to describe her, poor girlby the Mergovingians back to France not that France as such existed back then, but in that general direction and that was why her life as written by the, Roman or Italian, depending on your point of view, Venantius Fortunatus wound up on a wish list of mine.

The interesting or sad thing about saint's lives, even when as apparently is the case the author probably knew their subject is that they tend to be impersonal - deliberately - the saint is already part of the Divine realm, they do not burp or have rumbling stomachs, they are unlike other people, indeed unlike themselves, they are like other saints, and even in this case remind us a tiny bit of Jesus. The saint's life is an exemplar, and exemplary and follows the example of earlier saints as strictly as possible.

Anyhow Radegund, as I said, was a bit of war plunder, and earmarked as a future wife for the Merovingian king. The Merovinginians were the famous long haired kings, they were not like other men and they didn't muck about making a game of marriage by having only one spouse, no, they did things in proper and serious kingly style, her future husband, King Clotaire, had five other wives so when Radegund began to practice celibacy, he still had a wife for every day of the week (allowing for time off at the weekends). I was surprised to read that Radegund was made a Deacon, the Church has become more restrictive it seems over time, on the other hand she was the daughter and niece of Kings in the kingdom of Thuringia as in a few other places at the time it was felt a bit dull and inconvenient to have only one king at a time plainly it would have been a problem if you suddenly needed a king and there wasn't one to hand there were some down sides to an over abundance of kings though and married to another king, plus she was slated to become a saint not an unusual career move for members of royal families at the time so it may have been hard to refuse her desire particularly when the family she had married into definitely did not have the habit of having people who had mildly vexed them thrown over city walls - waking up to find a horse's head in your bed is bad, not waking up because you've been tossed over a city wall....

I was impressed that Clotaire didn't marry the slip of a girl he had dragged back to France as loot immediately, instead he had her secluded on an estate until she was in her late teens maybe even early twenties which seems remarkably unbarbaric considering.

Being an unholy person with possibly a lazy inclination towards psychological readings I wondered if Radegund's drive towards a holy life was an act of resistance. Your family's kingdom has been crushed and obliged to hand over herds of pigs in tribute, all your male relatives are dead, you're dragged whether you like it or not to the marriage bed of the enemy of you family - what can you do? Holiness might be seen as an act of agency, indeed the only one culturally available to her, a way of asserting control over her own body which enabled her to have her own household and to live independently - of her husband at least.

It is unknown if her husband was unhappy about all this, but a king is a politician too, and a woman aspiring to ever closer union with the Church and the divine realm is pretty thoroughly prevented from galloping off and encouraging rebellion or marrying a rival brother or a rival who was not a brother, so it was an acceptable course of action, plus it is useful to have a saint in the family, someone who might be able to put in a good word in the right ear - a useful consideration if you have a bad conscience, which was a peril of the job of being a barbarian king.

The other thing which struck me about Radegund's life in a monastery with other nun's is that apart from the miracles, she lived the life of an ordinary housewife, she cooked, she cleaned, she stayed with the sick, she had a simple diet of rye bread and lentils, abstained from meat, fish, eggs and fruit, had simpler clothes. Most women lived as she did at the time, it was the normal condition of womanhood, but you only get to be considered holy if you are rich and chose to live like a poor person.
There are some nice details , she not only cleaned the shoes of the other nuns at night - she also rubbed them with fat.

If an act of agency and resistance, it entailed submission and self denial to a way of life even more demanding than a long haired king, she took to wearing chains to mortify the flesh, which was resonant for me as she had been a war captive, Fortunatus says that her flesh grew round the iron rings that she wore to which the chains were fastened, which given her restricted diet is hard to imagine as plausible - perhaps a miracle.

Well I could go on, but that might involve spoilers.