The Roman Middle Ages: Aspects of Late Antique-Medieval Cultural Continuity in Old French Hagiography

Abstract

The third chapter synthesizes the approaches of the first two with the aid of one of the earliest extant Old French texts, the Vie de saint Léger, which is preserved in a single late tenth-century manuscript. Here, I examine the ways in which a Roman-based identity would have negotiated the period of Frankish rule (496-843), when Romanity contended with a new and inferior sociopolitical role. Seeing in the Vie de saint Léger the descendant of a mostly unwritten popular oral-poetic tradition, I claim that it uses the memory of St Leudegar's martyrdom (c. 679) to discuss sociopolitical questions in a situation where a legally subordinate 'Roman' population could most readily find recourse with the episcopate. The poem reflects an undercurrent of Roman identity throughout the Frankish period and beyond, an identity maintained and expressed in vernacular hagiographic poetry.