Allegedly, the monk Gallus established a hermitage in the Steinach valley in modern-day Switzerland around 612.Footnote 1 The prestige of this hermitage later grew, developing over the following centuries into one of the preeminent monasteries in the medieval West.Footnote 2 Gallus, reputedly a companion and kinsman of the Irish abbot and monastic founder Columbanus, is a shadowy figure at best.Footnote 3 Though the character of Gallus appears first in Jonas of Bobbio’s Vita Columbani (ca. 642), a series of successive, iterative hagiographical works on the life of Gallus represent the earliest attempts to record the origins of monastic life at Saint-Gallen and the earliest efforts to preserve the memory of the founding saint.Footnote 4 These two ambitions worked in lockstep. Later members of the community at Saint-Gallen celebrated their monastery by imagining, reimagining, memorializing, re-memorializing, recording, and re-recording four Vitae Galli, a process that has recently come to be called réécriture. Footnote 5
Four réécrivains left us with four successive standalone vitae Galli written over the course of the eighth and ninth centuries after the monastery grew in affluence and influence under the guidance of a succession of able abbots, especially Gozbert (r. 816–37).Footnote 6 This growth correlated to the waxing coeval written culture, of sacred and secular letters alike, resulting in the mid-ninth-century development of the monastery’s peerless scriptorium and still-extant (and still excellent) abbey library.Footnote 7 Saint-Gallen was a “community of commemoration”—a body bound by collective memory.Footnote 8 The production of text was an essential byproduct of the process of community-building. Consequently, this bond admitted a diversity of strategies to realize this commemoration, resulting in multiple surviving literary treatments of the community’s “charter narrative,” namely, the successive vitae and miracles of their saint.Footnote 9
The Bollandists list more than ten works, written before 1000, testifying to this iterative process (BHL 3245–58). These works are diverse: six vitae, three in prose and three in verse (one fragmentary), a Latin translation of a German Heiligenlied, a fictive genealogy of the saint, and appearances of the saint in both letters and chronicles. The most important of these works are the first three prose vitae: the anonymous Vita vetustissima (around 680–771) and two later vitae by monks of Reichenau, the first by Wetti (before 824) and the second by Walahfrid Strabo (833/34). Also foundational is the anonymous Vita metrica (between 833/34 and 837). From these sources stem all subsequent works.Footnote 10
Just as Wetti looked to the earlier Vita vetustissima to build his own Vita Galli, so too did Walahfrid in turn base his Vita Galli on Wetti’s version, and likewise also did the anonymous author of the Vita metrica incorporate materials from his hagiographic predecessors. These acts of reception reveal a “chain of custody” for the Gallus-narrative, a series in which basic biographical elements remained the same but which differed in style and elaborated in content.Footnote 11 Comparisons in instances of réécriture reveal the ways in which the subsequent authors used, adapted, and added to the previous material. This process also raises questions about why new works were deemed necessary. Narratives that undergo réécriture are adaptive properties; the resultant texts respond to the exigencies of their compositional moment.Footnote 12 While these texts, at a minimum, present views of Gallus’ travels, his fledgling hermitage, and his miracles, maximally they provide a glimpse into institutional integrity as a focal point. What follows is a close reading of these four sources, taking especial care not only to respect their boundaries but also to comprehend their interdependent and symbiotic relationships, and being most especially attuned to the information they convey about the moments that merited their composition.
The Four vitae: Réécriture in Process
Apart from Jonas’ brief mention of Gallus, the earliest account of his life and doings is the Vita vetustissima (hereafter VV; BHL 3245), a fragmentary account that survives in a solitary, mutilated manuscript (Saint-Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 2106).Footnote 13 The manuscript, written at Saint-Gallen around the middle of the ninth century, is, perhaps, a copy of the original.Footnote 14 Only a portion of the VV survives, although the materials that survive are sufficient to allow us to see the extent to which the later vitae followed it. While the VV, according to Walter Berschin, may have been initially composed in the 680s (about thirty years after the saint’s death), it took its final form around 771, incorporating in a second book posthumous miracles worked by the saint over the course of the eighth century.Footnote 15 Its author is uncertain. Later tradition at Saint-Gallen held that the author of the earliest chapters was Irish.Footnote 16 Iso Müller has commented on the Hiberno-Latin features in the text.Footnote 17 Its compositional location is also uncertain; the earliest stratum of the text predates the foundation of the monastery of Saint-Gallen under Abbot Otmar in 719, although Michael Richter has suggested Columbanus’s foundation at Bobbio as one possibility.Footnote 18 The Latinity of the anonymous author is not without its deficiencies; the author preferred analytical constructions and his syntax was largely paratactic. Never is the author’s Latin ad sensum, but the reader is left with the sense that the author’s language sat comfortably at the transitional moment between Late Latin and Romance. It may well be this comparatively pedestrian Latin that Gozbert found so distasteful. The VV, though fragmentary, is, apart from Jonas’ brief words, our oldest source recounting the history of Gallus and among our oldest sources relating to the history of Saint-Gallen. It is the foundation on which the subsequent, more detailed vitae were modelled.
Approximately fifty years after the VV assumed its final form, another attempt to narrate the vita of Gallus was undertaken by Wetti of Reichenau. Reichenau, a Benedictine establishment founded around 724 and located on an island in Lake Constance about fifty kilometers northwest of Saint-Gallen, was very much in the ambit of its southeastern neighbor, and its library began to assume shape over the first half of the ninth century.Footnote 19 Wetti was the head of the school at Reichenau during the abbacy of Heito I (r. 806–823) when it rose to prominence as a literary center. Wetti’s Vita Galli was written at the behest of Gozbert of Saint-Gallen (r. 816–837), testifying to the close links between these two houses.Footnote 20 Wetti’s Vita Galli dates between 816 and 824 (BHL 3246). The author opens his two-book vita with an acrostic dedicatory poem in attempted hexameters; this ugly little poem dedicates Wetti’s Vita Galli to Abbot Gozbert.Footnote 21
It is possible that Wetti wrote this vita to promote the interests of Saint-Gallen in its goal to achieve immunity from episcopal control, which was achieved in 818 by a charter from Emperor Louis the Pious.Footnote 22 Wetti’s intention may well have been to frame Saint-Gallen, the foundation, as roughly coeval with the foundation of the diocese of Konstanz, if institutional independence formed any part of his raison d’écrire. Wetti’s Vita Galli seems not to have met with favor; it survives in a single manuscript (Saint-Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 553, s. ixmed), but the context of its survival is illuminating: in addition to Wetti’s Vita Galli, this manuscript also contains readings for his feast day, the earliest witness to Jonas’ Vita Columbani, and the Genealogia Galli, which sees the saint’s genealogy arrayed alongside two other Irish luminaries, Saints Brigit and Patrick.Footnote 23 The codex seems to have functioned in a constitutional sense, containing texts that speak to the coming-into-being of the community at Saint-Gallen and linking it with the legacy of the wider Columbanian monastic familia. Wetti’s Latin is superior in almost every way to the Latinity of the anonymous author of the VV. Wetti was comfortable deploying sophisticated hypotaxis, and his language witnesses frequent clausulae. His word hoard and perspicacity, as well, seem superior, but speaking definitively on this point is difficult owing to the VV’s fragmentary state. While Wetti was a pedestrian poet at best, he was a serviceable Latinist. It is difficult to imagine that Gozbert faulted Wetti’s Latin when assessing his work.
But Gozbert was evidently unsatisfied with Wetti’s work because the abbot commissioned Walahfrid Strabo to write another vita around 833/34 (BHL 3247–51). This request coincided with two momentous events in the history of Saint-Gallen. First, in 833, Louis the German confirmed the privilege of Saint-Gallen to elevate its own abbot freely, anticipating the immunity extended by Louis in 854 absolving the monastery from tithing to the bishop of Konstanz. Second, the building of the new abbey church between 830 and 837 and the translation of Gallus’ relics to that church in 835 must have influenced this text.Footnote 24 Walahfrid’s Vita Galli proved to be much more popular than its predecessor, and, according to the reckoning of Bruno Krusch, it survives in no fewer than thirty medieval witnesses.Footnote 25 The work is arranged in two books: the first recapitulates Gallus’ deeds in life and the second recounts Gallus’ posthumous miracles. This arrangement would influence later accounts of Gallus’ vita, such as the prosimetric effort of Notker Balbulus.Footnote 26 Walahfrid’s Latin, like Wetti’s, was excellent, the product of wide reading and careful study. Rhetorical flourish is not foreign to his prose, and he exhibits a sense of taste and proportion when stylistically framing his episodes. He is capable of dramatic amplification, frequently engaging in gradatio, but never at the expense of clarity and sobriety. If it was Wetti’s Latin that Gozbert disliked, Walahfrid’s represented neither radical departure nor especial improvement.
But Gozbert collected another dedication in a vita of Gallus: if we are to trust its dedication, an anonymous author completed the Vita metrica sometime after Louis the Pious’ temporary deposition in 833/34 and before Gozbert’s death in 837 (BHL 3253).Footnote 27 It survives in a lone late-medieval manuscript witness (Saint-Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 587, s. xivex). The poem, which begins with an elegiac prologue of twenty lines followed by 1808 hexameters, narrates the vita of Gallus, braiding together earlier prose attempts. Its author is unknown. Walahfrid intended to write a verse vita of Gallus and Ermenrich of Ellwangen alleges that he received a commission for such a metrical vita from Gozbert.Footnote 28 But Gozbert, lacking patience enough to provide him time to complete it, commissioned “some new Homer” possessing “javelins… from an Irish bag” to complete it.Footnote 29 On these grounds, Walter Berschin has argued that the author responsible for the Vita metrica may have been Irish.Footnote 30
Whether the Vita metrica has any relationship to Walahfrid or Ermenrich is unclear. Arguing on stylistic grounds, Berschin has emphatically denied the possibility of Walahfrid’s authorship, while Wilhelm Schwartz has maintained Ermenrich’s authorship as an open possibility, a dubious proposition given Ermenrich’s own testimony.Footnote 31 Walahfrid did compose two short hymns on Gallus, Carmina 53 and 72, and Ermenrich composed a drafty vita of Gallus in the latter sections of his Epistola ad Grimoldum, but little else is certain.Footnote 32 The Latin of the Vita metrica betrays an author of wide reading with a discerning eye; he was a consummate poet. The author could crib at will lines and half-line runs from Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Juvencus, Prudentius, Coelius Sedulius, Arator, Venantius Fortunatus, Aldhelm, and the Paderborn Epic; he was also attuned to the poetry of Scripture.Footnote 33 Even so, the author usually refrains from elision, enjambment is reasonably frequent, and his poetic sense, while metrically sound, was derivative and rather unimaginative.Footnote 34
But essential here is the fact that Gozbert commissioned vitae of Gallus on three different occasions in the early ninth century. Each iterative vita subtly altered and adapted its predecessors, pressing the narrative into new molds to new ends. Albrecht Diem has argued that this process of réécriture reflected the growing influence of Benedictine monasticism in the Bodensee, and that may well be the case.Footnote 35 Yet, that interpretation is incomplete. Of course, réécriture is only undertaken when a need for it is perceived.Footnote 36 Hewing closely to the four early ninth-century vitae, we can observe two additional impetus for réécriture. First, this process responded to institutional concerns about integrity, facilities, and ecclesiology. It is no mistake that the vitae of Gallus appeared when they did, at moments of institutional investment and donation. Second, we should be attuned to the generic conventions of each vita. These vitae, though related narratologically, served different purposes: the VV was a vita written under late-antique hagiographical conventions; Wetti’s Vita Galli served a lectionary purpose; Walahfrid’s Vita Galli was equally indexical and constitutional; and the Vita metrica was a work fitted to secular letters, though doubtlessly undertaken by a churchman, written as an ‘institutional Aeneid,’ retelling in heroic meter the incipient steps of Saint-Gallen as a community.
A Palimpsest Gallus
Arraying the four early vitae of Gallus in parallel makes some illuminating observations clearer. The Gallus of the VV is, not surprisingly, a very different character than the Gallus of the Vita metrica. Crucially, each of these four vitae narrate many of the same events and these similarities are revealing, but equally revealing are the differences in framing between these authors—often on the level of word, grammar, and syntax. It is in the slippages between these four authors that we can get a sense of their disparate authorial ambitions. Each author approached the same basic materials and pressed these materials into the service of their authorial program—the very life blood of réécriture. Authors inflect differently Gallus’ birth narrative, episodes of potential embarrassment, building and community organization, his death, and posthumous deeds, and so make clearer their purposes for engaging in a chain of réécriture.
Birthing Gallus: Misit filium Hibernia, recepit patrem Suevia
Tradition holds Gallus to be an Irishman, one of the apostolically-sanctioned twelve companions that accompanied Columbanus from Bangor to Brittany around 590, though Jonas never provides for us a ‘roster’ of the twelve companions that accompanied Columbanus from Bangor to Francia.Footnote 37 As Dáibhí Ó Cróinín observes, a reader must assemble a roster of twelve severally.Footnote 38 Later traditions include Gallus among the number of Columbanus’ Irish retinue, but nothing in Jonas’ account suggests that Gallus had Irish origins. His ethnicity has attracted much commentary in recent years.Footnote 39 Gallus’ Irishness is a quantity that, wholly absent from early treatments, crept into accounts of his life incrementally.
The earliest testimonies—those of Jonas’ Vita Columbani and the VV—do not clarify Gallus’ ethnicity. Jonas’ failure to clarify Gallus’ ethnicity is curious, given the fact that he was comfortable parsing other members of Columbanus’ retinue using ethnic details.Footnote 40 One of us has argued that Jonas was thinking about Gallus ethnically, but not in a manner consonant with later treatments of his biography; Jonas’ Gallus was a figure of semiotic potency, a character cast in a penitential set piece advancing an argument for cenobitic obedience.Footnote 41 As Sven Meeder notes, silence on Gallus’ ethnic details in the VV on the other hand may be a function of the text’s acephalous state. If the author included a consideration of Gallus’ ethnicity, he did so in a section that no longer survives.Footnote 42 But such an argument is born from silence. A more accurate assessment, if a less charitable one, would recognize that the early Gallus materials do not consider his ethnicity among the crucial details of his personage and later treatments regard that quantity as central.
By the 820s, hagiographers largely dispel this ethnic ambiguity. From Wetti’s Vita Galli on, Carolingian authors leave no doubt about their belief that Gallus was a native of Ireland. Wetti writes, “This man, spending his youthful bloom on the island of Ireland, since he had stuck tightly to God from his boyhood and had surrendered to the study of the liberal arts, was commended with the assent of his parents to the venerable man Columbanus.”Footnote 43 Walahfrid is even more emphatic; his prologue is given over to a lengthy discussion of Ireland in geographical terms, sourced mainly from Solinus and Orosius.Footnote 44 Of his birth, Walahfrid writes,
When the distinguished monasticism of the very holy man Columbanus, known also as Columba, was held in esteem through the whole of Ireland, and a radiance just as splendid as the fiery sun was calling forth the love of all people for him on account of his singular excellence, just as had been foreseen about him before he was born, as the book of his deeds fully reveals; among those whom the reputation of his virtues had attracted [were] the parents of the blessed Gallus—people devout before God and prominent in worldly matters. Offering their son, then shining in the first bloom of his age, to the Lord as an oblate, they entrusted him to the Lord’s teacher [that is, Columbanus] in order that he might blossom in the discipline of religious life and imitate the examples of obedience and stricter purpose among the many followers of spiritual warfare.Footnote 45
Both Wetti and Walahfrid preserve the same basic narrative beats, but Walahfrid’s account is more involved and florid. Though clearly based on Wetti’s account, Walahfrid is expanding and dilating the narrative, elevating the diction to a level commensurate with Gallus’ growing prestige. The author of the Vita metrica also relates Gallus’ Irish origins, likely laboring in a tradition established by Wetti and Walahfrid. He writes,
The sun, which adorns the world with copiously flowing light, although accustomed to be reborn for us in the ruddy east, nevertheless rose again from westerly Ireland, a ray sent across to the yellow Sueves in Alamanic fields: I call Gall our ‘father,’ born from the teacher Columba, which, with the word having been enlarged, means Columbanus.Footnote 46
Of course, the poetic calisthenics of the Vita metrica outpace both Wetti and Walahfrid, in keeping with its genre, and the poet is likely incorporating the solar imagery identifiable in the poetic introduction to Jonas’ Vita Columbani. Footnote 47 References connecting Gallus to Ireland are wholly absent in Jonas’ Vita Columbani and the VV. Wetti refers to Gallus’ Irishness four times, Walahfrid refers to Gallus’ Irishness seven times, and the Vita metrica, a shorter work, refers to Gallus’ Irishness six times, usually when describing Gallus as Scotigena Gallus, a stock heroic epithet the poet deploys three times. The trend is clear: the later the author, the greater the emphasis on Gallus’ alleged Irish origins.
So, how do we account for the dearth of references to Gallus’ Irishness in early materials in light of the certainties about his Irishness expressed in his early, Carolingian-era vitae? As one of us has argued recently, a mania for Scoticitas—a deep appreciation for ‘Irish-likeness’—gripped Carolingian Francia. In contrast to their Merovingian forebears, the Carolingians valorized cosmopolitanism and pluralism, understanding diversity as a cornerstone of their definition of imperialism.Footnote 48 The other of us has described this phenomenon as “Hiberno-ethnosanctity,” a perceived holiness accruing to the Irish abroad such that some Continental saints were “Hibernicized.”Footnote 49 This process reimagines earlier non-Irish saints into Scoti, possessing all appurtenances and attributes of Irishness.Footnote 50 The two terms—Scoticitas and “Hiberno-ethnosanctity”—are synonyms.
The Gallus materials fit this pattern: the silence of early authors on Gallus’ ethnicity treat it as unimportant. Later Gallus materials place his ethnicity front and center. Any understanding of Gallus as an ‘authentic’ Irishman is made more vexing by the fact that the demographic aspects of Irish peregrinatio to the Continent remain poorly understood.Footnote 51 Still, as the character of Gallus underwent iterative réécriture, his ethnicity likewise was reimagined as increasingly crucial. Whether or not Gallus was ‘actually Irish’ is somewhat beside the point; the fact that his Irishness was assumed, reimagined, and foregrounded in successive vitae tells us about the allure of cosmopolitanism for Carolingian thinkers. Biography, in a sense, is rhetoric.
Embarrassing Gallus: Excommunicatio … cum hilaritate?
That Gallus was an associate of Columbanus is one of the immutable facts of Gallus’ iterative vitae. Whether or not he was Irish by birth, Gallus, it seems, drew much of his authority in religious life from his connection to Columbanus’ presence in Gaul. If the very early dates assigned to the VV are to be trusted, then the earliest account of Gallus’ vita is anterior to the foundation of the monastery of Saint-Gallen. Why would a vita precede the saint’s community? Would such a narrative have interested another community, such as the Columbanian community at Bobbio? Perhaps the VV was written for an incipient community congregating around Gallus’ hermitage between the saint’s death (around 650) and Otmar’s foundation of the monastery (719). Walahfrid’s Vita Galli describes those “devout clerics” who, inspired by “the memory of Gallus’s discipleship or by the love of God, kept daily vigils at the saint’s remains” and claims that such veneration persisted for many years, from the time of Dagobert (II, probably, r. 675–79) until that of Charles Martel (Mayor of the Palace, 718–41), a timeframe of almost seventy years.Footnote 52 It is not inconceivable, but conjectural, that one of these clerics authored the VV for this early community.
Gallus’ testy relationship with Columbanus might be our guide, however. As early as Jonas’ Vita Columbani, Gallus fails to obey his superior.Footnote 53 But Gallus’ later narrators are harsher. Both Wetti and Walahfrid describe an episode in which Columbanus, leaving Bregenz for Italy, placed an interdict on Gallus, then suffering an illness preventing him from travelling further, which forbade him to celebrate Mass for the rest of Columbanus’ lifetime.Footnote 54 This section is lacking from the VV, but some interdiction must have occurred: the fragment begins abruptly in an episode in which Gallus commands his deacon, Magnoald, to go to Bobbio to find out if Columbanus is alive or dead (Columbanus’ death had been revealed to Gallus in a vision).Footnote 55 The Vita metrica has things a little differently; when enjoined by Sigebert II to say a Mass after healing his daughter, Gallus demurs:
While my beloved Columbanus, the worthy producer of piety, consumes vital breath, I have been prevented from touching the holy office of a priest … But, however, in order that I may do, O prince, that which you urge, I will push on as before through the little indictment of my sweet teacher what you desire and what you wish to be done and what you suggest likewise.Footnote 56
The author of the Vita metrica lightens the interdiction to a greater degree than the three prose vitae, using the diminutive indiculum. Footnote 57
So, we can chart a progression from Gallus’ earliest vita when dealing with a potentially embarrassing event in the saint’s biography. In the VV, the monks of Bobbio give Magnoald a letter by Columbanus and the abbot’s staff, a sign that he was absolved from excommunication (using that word).Footnote 58 Wetti chooses to lessen the heft of this episode of reintegration, saying Gallus “was absolved,” using the passive with a suppressed agent and omitting the word ‘excommunicatio,’ the one with the fullest ecclesiastical clout. After all, Wetti had earlier framed Columbanus’ censure of Gallus as occurring “with a lightheartedness of spirit.”Footnote 59 Walahfrid achieves a balance in his portrayal, marrying the seriousness of the event but at the same time avoiding any unwanted connotations of excommunication, and he achieves this effect by switching grammatical moods—while Wetti uses the future tense (so, “If you do not wish to make yourself a sharer of my labors, you will not celebrate the mass during my lifetime”), Walahfrid uses the subjunctive: “I know, brother, that it is now burdensome for you to be wearied with so many labors for me. Nevertheless, before leaving this I declare: you should not presume to celebrate the Mass while I am living.”Footnote 60 The effect is subtle but serves to lessen the imperative. The author of the Vita metrica treats the injunction as diminutive, breakable in exigency, and trifling. Only later in the Vita metrica is Gallus fully restored, again by receiving Columbanus’ abbatial staff or cambutta. Footnote 61
The VV leans into the ‘criterion of embarrassment,’ but later authors are more skittish. Gallus receives absolution in every account, but the observable trend tends toward levity. The question is ‘why?’ and the answer may lie in generics. The VV was very much in the mold of a late-antique, warts-and-all, holy-man narrative.Footnote 62 Wetti’s Vita Galli was a lectionary document, intended for reading on 16 October (the saint’s feast day) to the liturgical assembly. Walahfrid’s Vita Galli was an indexical undertaking, a sophisticated, multi-part assemblage that records deeds for reference and commemoration. The Vita metrica was an exercise in hero-making—and features the strongest articulation of agency of the bunch. Interestingly, each author refers to the mechanism of restitution as the transference of Columbanus’ cambutta—his ‘abbot’s staff’—the signal, it seems, of amelioration.Footnote 63 The post-VV authors likely wished to deemphasize problematic moments of Gallus’ career. Text responds to circumstance.
Gallus Building: Dum in construendo oratorio cum fratribus laboraret
The accounts of Gallus’ hermitage, the incipient Saint-Gallen, follow a similar pattern. Generically, the built environment warps to the saint’s will. The VV recounts an episode that suggests that the original church Gallus constructed, unsurprisingly, was made of wood. Already, Gallus’ reputation was attracting a retinue. While Gallus “with his brothers and the people were working on a house of prayer,” one plank proves shorter than the rest by “four palms,” and the workmen, called magistri, want to throw it away. Gallus dismisses them for lunch and, when they return, the plank has grown half a foot longer than the rest.Footnote 64 Both Wetti and Walahfrid include this story, but both adapt it subtly, and not for reasons of style.Footnote 65 The author of the Vita metrica understandably has things differently, but the same narrative beats are identifiable:
It happened on a certain day by chance that he was restoring the blessed construction of the church with his brothers and the hands of craftsmen, and the end of a certain board was standing four—I say four!—palms shorter than the rest … Separating it from the works, it is scorned and rejected by all the makers and masters of the task … [Gallus] ordered the craftsmen to rest a while, until, with a meal had, they are able to recover their strength … They discovered—wonderful to happen and wonderful to relate!—that the measure of the board, which previously the builders spurn on account of its shortness, is longer than the others by a measure of one and a half feet! The ignorant people are astounded.Footnote 66
There is little daylight between these accounts, but where they depart from one another, they reveal much.Footnote 67
So, we can chart a progression from Gallus’ earliest vita when dealing with matters of community and infrastructure. In the VV and Wetti’s Vita Galli, those responsible for building are “the brothers and the people.” Apparently, Gallus had assembled a community before initiating the necessary infrastructure, and this community was accessible to outsiders.Footnote 68 Walahfrid, in contrast, purposefully excludes the people, leaving the brothers as those responsible for the labor. In the Vita metrica, we have a seemingly commercial arrangement in place: we encounter “craftsmen” and “makers” here. The proto-monastery, for Wetti, Walahfrid, and the Vita metrica, is an economic agent. The individuals responsible for wanting to discard the board are variously given: VV has them as magistri; Wetti as carpentarii; Walahfrid as artifices; the Vita metrica as factores, magistri, and aedificatores. What Wetti and Walahfrid intend with their usage is clear enough, and the author of the Vita metrica was indulging in a bit of variatio befitting his genre—but what intends the VV with the word magistri? Are we to understand these people to be ‘masters of their craft,’ or are they perhaps ‘masters’ in the monastic sense? By imagining the intended audience for these works, perhaps we can hazard a guess.
If the intent of the author of the Vita metrica was bombast, he certainly achieved that. Note, he chose to lengthen the board’s growth from half a foot to a foot and a half; his literal protraction of this miracle keeps within the boundaries of his genre—he is working with poetic excess. And the plebes are around to marvel at this prodigy. So, too, is Walahfrid and Wetti’s account sensible: Walahfrid was writing indexically for a monastic audience (and so excludes the plebes from the labor) and Wetti is writing for lectionary purposes. Wetti’s choice to include the plebes is comprehensible in light of the mixed audience likely to have assembled to hear this account on 16 October.Footnote 69 The author of the VV clarifies what he might have intended later. After the miracle of the plank, six monks, whom Wetti and Walahfrid describe as Irish and as coming from Luxeuil, arrive “to the cell of the man of God” entreating Gallus to assume the abbacy of Luxeuil.Footnote 70 These brothers are led first to the church and later into a house where they present Gallus with their request.Footnote 71 From this testimony, we are privileged to the imagined layout of the earliest foundation: Gallus’ hermitage was not a single cell, but a group of buildings.
By equating high office, even high monastic office, with the trappings of the world, Gallus refuses the request from Luxeuil, saying:
I fled all my friends and my neighbors into this ‘desert,’ following the prophetic words, with David saying: ‘I have been made a stranger to my brothers and a pilgrim to the sons of my mother.’ I condemn the city and episcopal rank and look down on all worldly riches.Footnote 72
Thus, for Gallus, assuming the position of authority in a community would violate his peregrinatio; he was an adherent to the eremitic ideal. If we are to believe that the author of VV was framing Gallus as a desert-dwelling, world-fleeing, late-antique holy man, then magistri would not refer to men in religious life, but to craftsmen.Footnote 73 In an ironic twist, a monastic community would gather around the memory of this hermit; Wetti, Walahfrid, and the Vita metrica, understanding that isolation is incommensurate with the communitarian ideal, subtly alter the initial framing of this episode. Text responds to audience.
Gallus Dying: Nunc obitus Galli texatur carmine cepto
Given the testimony of Jonas’ Vita Columbani, Gallus was almost doubtlessly an historical personage. In Gallus’ sole appearance in this text, after recounting a neat little allegorical episode in which Columbanus mildly chastises the disobedient Gallus, allowing Gallus to reel in a massive yield of fish, Jonas tells his reader that “[t]he aforementioned Gallus often told these things to us.”Footnote 74 Jonas was writing between 639 and 642.Footnote 75 While Jonas’ work is the only contemporaneous source written during the saint’s life, it is rather inconceivable that Jonas would have invented a character out of whole cloth despite the vaporousness of the saint in other Merovingian-era texts. The year of Gallus’ death is not recorded, and, since he used the perfect tense (whether in primary or secondary sequence is unclear), Jonas’ testimony cannot provide obituary data. Modern scholars, taking a cue from Jonas and Gallus’ early hagiographers, have reckoned his death sometime before 650. The four early lives, though, speak in one voice: Gallus died on 16 October at the age of ninety-five.Footnote 76
The death scene of Gallus is remarkably consistent between our four authors, but each approach the scene in accordance with the author’s intended compositional effect. Among the constants is the personage of Willimarus, a priest who had earlier pointed out a suitable place to build a cellula after the departure of Columbanus.Footnote 77 The VV has it like this:
After a bit of time, the priest Willimarus, coming to the cellula of the man of God, asked him to come down at once with him to the castrum [and] said to him also: ‘Father, why have you forsaken me, left bereft from your teaching? Have I sinned against you? I have come in order that you may teach us the way of truth, as is your custom, because your teaching is a necessity and favorable for us.’ And they went out together to the castrum and, with the people having been called, he began to preach and to teach there, and he remained there for two days. On the third day, a fever struck him, and he became very sick, so much so that he was not able to take food nor to return to his cellula. And he laid in bed ill with languor for fourteen days.Footnote 78
Wetti expatiates this narrative but leaves its beats untouched.
When the Creator of the world then wished to reveal his [that is, Gallus’] merits and many people were panting with a desire for his appearance, it happened that the aforementioned Willimarus, a priest of Arbon, came to his cellula owing to their prior familiarity … ‘Have I,’ he said, ‘sinned upon you, O elect of God, that you do not condescend to visit the little home of your servant? I beg through Him by whose power we might be instructed through your teaching in order that, by the grace of edification, you may come and teach the people with your honey-flowing dogma so that, in your labor for the flocks panting for instruction, you may take an unwilting fruit in the heavenly realm.’Footnote 79
In contrast to the Gallus of the VV, Wetti’s Gallus takes some convincing, dedicated hermit that he was.Footnote 80 But in the end,
The devoted helper of many came together with the priest to the castrum … Where he remained for two days in the work of God, compelled by the vehemence of both the priest and also the people. But on the third day, wishing to see again his nurslings [that is, back at his cellula], impeded by the vexation of fevers whose sharp taste had so thickened in him that he was not eating even the minimal bit of food that was his custom … Therefore, on the fourteenth day, the infirmity of his body was growing [and] the famous athlete of Christ was preparing himself. And then, with the fourteenth day coming, on which we believe, he received his reward for his labors, with his useless limbs having been consumed and with nothing left behind but skin and bone, never ceasing from the work of God, either directing the solace of prayers to heaven, or gushing forth with an eloquence of instruction, indefatigable in the service of Christ … he gave his holy soul to heaven.Footnote 81
Interesting here is the fact that Wetti mentions cohabitators at Gallus’ hermitage; his cellula is a proto-coenobium!Footnote 82 Also, whereas the death-scene in the VV is a rather muted affair, the death-scene in Wetti’s Vita Galli is ornate and protracted. Organized around participial phrases, making full use of the sequence of tenses, and relentlessly clausal, Wetti’s more nimble control of the sententium periodicum and syntax allows him to braid the sequence more synthetically than the analytical treatment given by the VV. Wetti heightens the tension of the scene as it speeds toward Gallus’ death; one could well imagine this being read before an assembled crowd, chanted almost, until the character (and the lector!) finally spends his spirit.
Walahfrid takes a middle path between the spartan VV and the florid Wetti. He has Gallus’ death in this way:
The priest Willimarus, coming to the cella of the holy man, asked him to come out with him to the castrum. And, in order to obtain that which he wanted, the stooping man spoke his complaint in a doleful voice: ‘Why, father, have you forsaken, practically despised, me, who leans upon the admonitions of your words, and why do you deprive me, a devoted hearer, of the wholesome instructions of your teaching? To what am I able to ascribe this abjection, if not to the fetidness of my sins? For if my life were not displeasing in your judgement, you would not be depriving lovable me from the solace of your instruction. Now, therefore, do not abject us on account of our sins, but, having been called forth by the mandates of the Lord, open the path of truth to those desiring it and bestow to us the gift of your customary kindness.’Footnote 83
Again, Willimarus is perceiving Gallus to have abnegated some instructional responsibility—he is keeping his teaching to himself inappropriately. Willimarus is entreating instruction, perhaps an indication of the appropriate orientation assumed between monastic foundations and the world. For Willimarus, it is not sufficient that Gallus work on his own salvation in isolation; rather, his responsibility is to direct those energies to the salvation of all. Gallus is moved by the invitation, and Walahfrid continues,
The lover of piety descended with him, and they came to the castrum. With the multitude having been called on a solemn day, the holy man refreshed the hearts of the avid people with the sweetness of prayer and what he said clothed them with a light of wisdom so great that it was heard with the greatest rejoicing of everyone and was honored with the full reverence of all.Footnote 84
When Gallus preaches, he is effective. His inclination to eremitism stands at odds with the effect he could have had. Willimarus’ enjoinder, then, seeks to help Gallus realize his full potential as an instructor of the people. It is not enough to work on one’s own salvation; collective salvation ought to be the object of religious enterprise. Having realized this fact, Gallus can now depart from this world:
And, so, having passed two days in that same place, he was seized by a fever on the third day [and] its violence swiftly oppressed him so greatly that he was able neither to return to his cell nor to accept the meager sustenance of food. And when he had labored for fourteen days in this infirmity … having been freed from the prison of this life, he returned his soul, full of blessed merits [and] holding fast with perennial profit.Footnote 85
Walahfrid walks the middle path between the spare account of the VV and Wetti’s bombast, quite in keeping with his intention to provide an even-handed, if partisan, institutional account. All three authors record this exchange between Willimarus and Gallus, all agree that he fell ill after preaching, and all agree on the timeframe of his infirmity. Where they differ is in their relative theatricality. The VV and Walahfrid are sober and tempered, while Wetti designs his account for performance.
The Vita metrica follows the same pattern and likewise exposes its rationale for composition:
Now the death of Gallus is woven in this song, by means of which he, leaving behind all worldly matters, sought heaven, [and was] joined to the angelic citizens of the blessed seat. O greater Germania, happy because of so great a patron, who deserved to climb the worldly heights and to see the regions … When omnipotent God, the mover of all honors, determined to lift out of the darkness of the world the favorable man, the unconquered combatant, the probate veteran, by means of which he might seize the prizes of his virtues with an everlasting dowry, a priest, Willimar by name, coming with earnest prayers and a quiet voice, entreats, demands, longs for, asks, begs, prays, and says: ‘I ask, father, do not condemn my wish: you, a counsellor whom I have always loved, are pleasant to me, from whose pious prayer I have taken up the sweetest utterances, whose every bounty I, following your footsteps, have perceived; I beg that we hasten to the castrum with even steps, in order that the people, witnessing the lessons of salvation, might hear and be able to know well the path of faith through you.’Footnote 86
Unless the poet is punning on the near-homophony of eremitum and emeritum, gone is any reference to a hermitage: no cella, diminutive or otherwise, to be found; the poet is imagining a coenobium. He stacks seven verbs, an almost pleonastic diazeugma, to communicate the idea of request that the prose authors achieved with a simplex word. This variegating palilogia, an epizeuxis based on concept rather than bare repetition, reduplicates the basic meaning of the action constructively rather than contrastingly. The effect is to render a line heavy in dactyls that stacks Willimar’s (now rendered using the Germanic stem without case-ending) singular action aspectually. Readers cannot believe that he spasmodically did all these things in a single act. The poet continues:
They come to the castrum; there a great number of men [were] demanding the arrival of Gallus with a thought of their heart. When the servant of the Lord espied this crowd, he then desired to revive them all with the sweet nectar of dogma. What can I say! He restores the bystanding crowd and outstanding font of virtues, he absorbs, he strengthens, he revives [them]. After he enriched everyone with the divine gift, they, rejoicing, repay him and throng him with praise; speaking their many proclamations about holy Gallus, they extolled excessively the shining teachings of the blessed man.Footnote 87
The poet deploys the same device as above, stacking verbs to fit the meter, but he does so here with different effect. No longer are the verbs close synonyms, they are now only obliquely (and metaphorically) linked to public speaking; just as we can ‘soak up the crowd’ to convey a sense of reveling in the spotlight, so too can the Gallus of the Vita metrica come to realize a preacher’s delight in a willing congregation. To be sure: Gallus is converting the audience, but he himself is converted. Gallus can now die:
These things thus accomplished in that same place, after the sun had set twice, a third light appeared: the rich grower of virtues is shaken, is troubled, and burns with immense fevers. In such a way, behold, O reader, weigh carefully the number of days during which he, afflicted, bore the dire fire: how many the fourth letter after the sixth number signifies (that is, 10), if the fourth number (that is, 4) is joined by the first term (that is, 10+4=14), through just as many suns Gallus, the lover of piety, very patiently endured the fever, according to reports, and, having been placed on the threshold of death, the blessed man did not cease to bear thanks to God by means of assiduous prayers … He climbed to the stars of the sky, undergirded by riches earned, the body returning to the dirt, his soul, perennially rejoicing, with the repose of the saints guiding it, returning to the heavenly Lord.Footnote 88
Again, the poet engages in verb-stacking, but here we must understand the device to be zeugma rather than diazeugma, because the ablative noun in the initial position of line 1395 shifts syntax when moving between passive and active verbs (that is, from an ablative of agent to an ablative of cause, means, manner, or attendant circumstances). Of course, the poet clarifies the scriptural references of the numeration of the days spent preaching, framing Gallus as a Christ-like holy hero. Really the Vita metrica is of a piece apart, aiming at a different target than any of the prose vitae; the author sought to frame Gallus in heroic terms and turned his poetic acumen to the task. He is providing the community with a hero reckoned on secular lines to complement, not compete with, other authors.
But what are the accoutrements of this episode? Consistent between the latter three authors is the fact that Willimarus both led Gallus to his future hermitage and led him away from his hermitage prior to his death. Thus, we must countenance the fact that this Willimarus, a native of Arbon, both initiates Gallus’ hermitage and occasions the conversion of that location into a coenobitic community. From a compositional standpoint, such bookending is unlikely to be a mistake. Where our authors are consistent, they speak to tradition; where they differ, they do so with intention. It seems that all four authors agree that the matter of Gallus—his vita and events immediately proceeding from his death—represent a unit. The first book of the VV concludes sharply with Gallus’ death; the opening chapters of the second book concern the immediate aftermath of his death. The Vita metrica likewise closes with a poetic rendering of the immediate effects of Gallus’ death. Wetti, on the other hand, groups the immediately posthumous miracles (that is, those materials borrowed from the VV and conveyed forward to the Vita metrica) into his first book, reserving his second book for posthumous miracles pertaining to Gallus’ cultus (Table 1).Footnote 89
Table 1. Gallus’ Posthumous Miracles
Very little unique in Wetti is found outside the VV. Wetti’s was a rewriting for style, not substance. Moreover, Walahfrid seems to consider the hinge-point between his two books as naturally lying at the point when Gallus’ remains are returned to his hermitage, understandable if we imagine Walahfrid’s subtextual focus to be the community at Saint-Gallen rather than the foundational figure of Gallus. Likewise, so closely does the Vita metrica follow the materials and structure of the VV that it is conceivable that the poet structured his work on that iteration of Gallus’ life, merely borrowing from Wetti and Walahfrid selectively. Walahfrid, in this sense, appears as an outlier; only he provides anything like reportage extending to his present day.
The Literary Afterlife of Gallus
Our three prose vitae are each divided into two books: in each, book one considers Gallus’ life and deeds; in each, book two lists posthumous miracles allegedly worked through Gallus’ intercession. The Vita metrica, a secular encomium in heroic hexameters, also treats Gallus’ career and posthumous miracles, but the focus is squarely on the former, the latter accounting for about a quarter of the text. The posthumous miracles each text includes reveal much about a given author’s intent when composing their text in the first place. Of the approximately forty discrete miracles these authors preserve between them, a few general trends are observable. First, relative attention or inattention to institutional integrity, facilities, and ecclesiology mark each text. As authors are sensitive to rhetoric, circumstance, audience, and meaning, each author selects intelligently in order to accomplish their authorial ambition. Second, the miracles a given author communicates reveal substantially his intention. The VV wove the life of a late-antique hermit; Wetti designed his text for aural consumption; Walahfrid was writing an encyclopedia entry; and the Vita metrica, classicizing ‘charter narrative’ that it is, was designed to entertain as much as edify. Each author selected his posthumous miracles with a set ambition in mind.
As Walahfrid states,
There is so great a bounty of miracles which the Lord worked at his tomb at diverse times that it is not easily able to be expressed [even] with a zeal for writing. Many of these are laid aside owing to their abundance; truly, the few mentioned are inserted into this little work in order to commend their memory to posterity.Footnote 90
So, even our most encyclopedic author engaged in an act of winnowing. We should be attuned to constraining factors that formed criteria for inclusion for our authors. These include generic concerns and an author’s intended effect. If VV was a record of a late-antique holy man, if Wetti intended a lectionary document, if Walahfrid aimed at indexical completion, and if the Vita metrica sought to frame Gallus as a ‘holy hero,’ then the posthumous miracles that each selected for inclusion fit within each of those ambitions (Table 2).
Table 2. Gallus’ Posthumous Miracles, Collated from the Authors’ Second Books
As should be clear from Table 2, Walahfrid is attempting something different in his second book. The VV preserves Gallus as a wonderworking thaumaturge; Wetti speaks to concerns of social order and secular and ecclesiastical relationships; Walahfrid’s postmortem Gallus preserves both these visions but is rather more locally focused. Gallus’ wonderworking flows through his eponymous institution; Saint-Gallen, the place, emerges as the vehicle for Saint Gallus, the intercessor, to distribute his favor. Walahfrid’s second book, the lengthiest of the bunch, underscores the institutional and location-specific miraculous deeds of the deceased Gallus. Gallus is everywhere a postmortem intercessor, but only in Walahfrid does that intercession continue. We should not be surprised: the VV gives us a late-antique holy man, Wetti gives us a reworking fit for public address in mixed secular and religious company, and Walahfrid pretends to completion as an institutional record. Despite the fact that VV is brief and Wetti fails to include the rich array of miraculous occurrences preserved by Walahfrid, the miracles each author includes speak to their particular use of the Gallus narrative. Each author advances a hallmark miracle, a miracle that we can interpret as central to their authorial program.
Each of these texts takes the same basic historical framework, the same character, and the same theater of events and tasks these details with different jobs. If, in the words of Monique Goullet and Martin Heinzelmann,
One might define réécriture as the composition of a new version (hypertexte) of a preexistant text (hypotexte), obtained by formal changes that affect the signifier ([whether] quantitative, structural, or linguistic changes), or by semantic changes that affect the signified. The term réécriture then designates the action of rewriting as well as, by metonymy, the new version obtained.Footnote 91
Then the process that produced the materials pertaining to Gallus, each fashioned out of a textual predecessor but composed for different ends, certainly qualifies as réécriture. We may even peek into the animating impulses for such a process by viewing the resultant products. The VV, very much interested in creating a record of a late-antique holy man, has more in common with earlier texts—more like Athanasius’ Anthony, less like Gregory the Great’s Benedict or Jonas’ Columbanus. For the author of the VV, Gallus was more a hermit than a founder, reluctant to engage with the wider world. As we have seen, Wetti’s authorial program is made plain by his theatrical dealing with Gallus’ death scene. His text was meant to be read aloud in mixed company, and he crafted his language specifically to achieve its maximal effect. Walahfrid’s collection of posthumous miracles is rather more institutional in nature.Footnote 92 The Vita metrica is plain in this instance: Gallus is a “venerable hero” deserving of esteem.Footnote 93
Writing, especially in the medieval circumstance, was hard and costly. The act of composition is not a natural undertaking in the absence of necessity. When we can observe processes of réécriture, we ought to pause and ask ourselves why. As often as not, the answer must lie in the fact that whatever materials a réécrivain had ready-to-hand had ceased to be useful for the purposes they were called to meet. In the case of Gallus, the intervention of Abbot Gozbert looms largely. Gozbert recognized the myriad deficiencies of the VV and recognized that patronizing a process of réécriture was the surest way of yielding a useful commemorative text. Singularly, in our understanding of this process, the Gallus materials have witnessed the most concerted and sustained period of réécriture. Footnote 94 The VV that Gozbert had in hand failed to rise to the necessities of his growing community. He handed the task to two authors outside his community. The monk of Reichenau, Wetti, produced a text suited to lectionary purposes but was insufficiently indexical. He handed the task yet again to another monk of Reichenau, Walahfrid, whose contribution satisfied the community and those beyond it, if manuscript evidence is anything to go by. But Gozbert also had a yearning for a Gallus suited to secular letters; the author of the Vita metrica rose to that occasion. Each of these vitae, all composed before 850, advanced the same materials to different ends. The common thread was Gozbert, a testament to his stewardship as abbot of the Gallus cultus and his involvement in cultures of learning.
