Handsomely produced, this book focuses on a series of saints' lives from the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries associated in various ways with Auxerre. Constantius of Lyon's late fifth-century Vita Germani was not composed at Auxerre, but it did establish the cult of Germanus, the town's most famous bishop. Evidence for communication in Constantius's influential text is compared with evidence from sixth- and seventh-century "Merovingian" sources, the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, five uitae, two passiones, and the Reuelatio Corcodemi. The author also brings into play Heiric of Auxerre's ninth-century Vita Germani metrica and his Miracula sancti Germani as well as the Gesta pontificum Autissiodorensium composed by the Auxerre canons, Alagus and Rainogala. These ninth-century texts make extensive use of the earlier documents and shed important light on them.
Wolfert van Egmond's meticulous and precise study of this body of material sought to isolate descriptions of communicative acts that could be further analyzed to chart transitions in communication over time, especially in relation to the written word and other means of communication, principally oral discourse and ritual acts. Writing for the bishop of Lyon in the fifth century, Constantius's prose reveals a society in which written communication was "nothing out of the ordinary" (198) in both elite secular and ecclesiastical circles. Gestures and rituals, such as the Roman aduentus, also communicated messages. The sixth- and seventh-century documents seem to reveal an important communicative shift. Writing has become restricted to the clerical class and, in these texts, mostly to bishops and those associated with them. Writing has become a tool, employed primarily to know the sacred writings (a description of a communicative act can amount to a reference to a saint praised for knowing the scriptures). Non-written forms of communication, gestures and rituals, remain important in the later texts.
The chief value of this study rests on the detailed scrutiny van Egmond accorded to each of the documents, many of which have escaped the attention of modern scholarship. His analysis of the seventh- century Vita sancti Germani interpolata is the best available. The unknown author expanded Constantius's text by artfully inserting earlier texts (including the interesting, but hidden from modern view, Reuelatio Corcodemi) and some original material. Van Egmond also provides a much clearer picture of the dating and affiliations of the other sixth- and seventh-century texts, most of which are only available in older, Bollandist editions. As for the theme of the book, communication, van Egmond acknowledged the limitations of his investigation (200). His strongest finding seems to be that hagiographical texts have great potential for the study of communication. Some readers may disagree with his assertion that "nothing appears to have changed" in the ways that the ninth-century authors, Heiric, Alagus, and Rainogala, exemplified communicative acts (199-200). What is different in the ninth century is that these writers were self conscious authors who told their readers what they were doing and sometimes explicitly acknowledged and cited verbatim their sources. These Auxerre authors referred to the libelli of their predecessors and Heiric even acknowledged drawing on written material preserved in the archives of his church for information about Germanus's contemporary miracles. Schoolmen raised in a world of books, their references to writing are much richer than banal nods to sacred scriptures. And, given the episcopal impetus to writing at Auxerre in the sixth and seventh centuries, it might be significant to note that Heiric wrote for his abbot and his monastic brothers. His vivid, almost dramatic prose style and his skill with meter also owed something to the changed intellectual climate of the ninth century.