ABSTRACT
In a great many pages, and with almost as many transcendental events to report, the Frankish historian and hagiographer Gregory of Tours (d. 594) rarely offers anything to suggest that the chant of Mass or Office might provoke a vision, a miraculous cure or a flood of divine inspiration. Although he accepts that the supernatural constantly breaks through the surface of life, especially the life of monks, his sense that chanting might be some form of conjuration or that human singers share a repertoire of vocal praise in words and music with their angelic counterparts seems intermittent at best. At no point in Gregory’s writing, for example, does any pious man or woman see and hear a saint or angel singing a text and associated melody with the kind of stabilised identity or fixed place in the liturgy that might encourage Gregory to give the incipit of the text and identify the feast(s) where the chant was used.
