Ive just been reading Martin Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century (CUP, 2001) who argues convincingly and in great detail that Gregory is using symbolic figures in the Ten Books of History: the Good King, the Bad King, the Good Bishop etc. And, in glorious circularity, he is planning death panels and so that is proof that he must be an evil ruler. Obama is an evil ruler and therefore of course he is planning death panels, because thats what evil rulers do. You could see this as an extreme distortion of some possible plans for living wills or not paying for heroic treatment of the terminally ill, but its probably better to see these statements as symbolic. Take the claim that Obamas plan for health care involves death panels, for example. But there are implausible stories which have achieved wide circulation and belief without such long term propaganda efforts: Slacktivist has an interesting example of one.Īnd some claims go beyond the merely deeply implausible to a different level.

One answer is that this is simply because such stories have been pushed so hard by particular powerful interest groups. If you look at many of the claims circulating in the US about Barack Obama, (such as the claim that he is not a citizen) theyre not remotely plausible, and yet theyre widely accepted. I would have adhered to such views once, but recent events have made me less certain. Propaganda, after all, needs to be plausible. Alternatively, for social/cultural historians, even if his stories are not true at all, but purely propaganda, they reflect what a king or a queen or a bishop could feasibly do. We can see the outlines of particular actions by his enemies through his distorted stories about them.

Nevertheless, even though his text is not transparent, we can read through it to get useful material. Gregory might be naive (all that reporting of miracles), but his artlessly gory portrayals of Merovingian life told us all we needed to know about the horrors of Merovingian society.Ī more recent view of Gregory, along with many other medieval historians, is that his history reflects his own prejudices or that he is writing propaganda. Historians once largely believed what Gregory of Tours wrote in his Ten Books of History (which is how the History of the Franks is now more accurately referred to).

Gregory of tours the merovingians