Hagiography and the Experience of the Holy in the Work of Gregory of Tours

The rich literature associated with the Desert Fathers provides con-vincing evidence of the important role played by charismatic figures in the transformation of Late Antiquity. In the West the Life of St Martin by Sulpicius Severus and, even more explicitly, his Dialogues (Concerning St Martin) demonstrate how quickly and completely this charismatic style infected the Latin-speaking western Empire, hardly a century after it had come to attract widespread attention in the East. Several studies by Peter Brown have done much to clarify the social processes attested to in this literature, the rise of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, and his function as a "village patron.These great "friends of God" served as the centres around which the new Christian social order accreted, leading in the East to a revival of the urban life of pagan antiquity but in the West to a new social order — essentially the social order of mediaeval Christendom — organized around the cult of the saints, now carefully regulated by an episcopal elite largely drawn from the old Gallo-Roman aristocracy.