In what follows I will first paradigmatically compare Emilio’s reliance on Gregory of Tours with the method of earlier and non-humanist authors. Emilio’s complex attempt to transform French history has many fascinating facets, including his style and his biographical method, but here I would like to focus particularly on his critical approach to sources. Įmilio’s use of Gregory of Tours to compose this fresh history of the Franks highlights the degree to which various elements of the traditional view of French history were based on the unreliable constructions of medieval authors. It was, incidentally, only one of many national histories that Italian humanists wrote for transalpine monarchs. It was in this capacity that he spent the rest of his life in the service of King Charles VIII, inscribing the history of the Franks from 420 to 1488 into the ten books of a work entitled De rebus gestis Francorum.
Emilio first found employment in Paris as the secretary of Cardinal Charles de Bourbon, to whom he owed his later position as royal court historian. īorn in Verona, Emilio studied humaniores and law in Rome and Padua, went to Paris to pursue a degree in theology, and soon joined the Parisian humanist circle around Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. Yet only in the sixteenth century did historians of France begin to make direct use of Gregory in their work.Ī large, and perhaps the most decisive, role in Gregory’s rediscovery in French historiography was played by the Italian humanist Paolo Emilio Coimo (1460-1529).
It is not, however, his style and language that have won him this distinction, but rather the fact that his Historiarum libri decem is the first and indeed the only extant primary source for early Merovingian times. Today Gregory of Tours (538-594) is considered the father of Frankish history. 2: Informationsverarbeitung in der Stadt des 12.1: Die Stadt des Mittelalters an der Schwelle zur Frühen Neuzeit.
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