63 Colloquial and Li.. - Ganino.com

The tale of Frodebert’s tail 381
Many letter collections regularly preserve dossiers with incoming as well
as outgoing letters. 16 Despite the company it keeps, the correspondence
cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered form-letters. 17 It
was copied by whoever assembled the formulae from Sens, who also started
to number them as if they were part of the formulary (51, 52, 53). The
suggestion (Walstra 1962: 31) that a judicial process united both sides of the
correspondence at St Denis is unlikely. Someone may have tried to remove
names from the text and to censor it. For example, on f. 27 v the second
occurrence of Importune has been erased, on f. 28bis r in butte (if that is what
it read) has been deleted, on f. 28 r a large tear removed the name of the
nunnery where Grimoald’s wife was sent. The tear has created large lacunae
at the ends of lines in Imp. 2.7–13 and at the beginnings of lines in Imp.
3.9–17. It is possible to guess (only approximately) how many characters
may be missing by comparing the numbers of characters in complete lines
at the beginning of the pages, which about average 48.5 on 28 r and 53 on
f. 28 v .F.28bis r-v has a slight tear at the bottom that has affected Frod. 4.4
and 21–3.
7content
Many have found the content of these letters somehow improbable or
inconsistent with their being ‘real’ letters. 18 Readers are split between the
more historically minded who want them to be documents and who presumably
find their content authentic (if crude), 19 and the literary scholars
who cannot believe that Merovingian bishops engaged in such correspondence,
and prefer to see here calumny or parody (some signs of urbanity).
Each side has assumed that the burden of proof lies with the other. The
decision-tree can be set out thus:
1. Could the authors be the bishops Frodebert and Importunus?
If so, are they writing to each other? To others too?
What is their purpose? Polemic?
2. Were the letters written by a third party?
If so, who was the audience?
What was the purpose? Humour? Or calumny?
16 E.g. Shanzer and Wood 2002: 28–57 on Avitus of Vienne’s collection.
17 Pace Walstra (1962: 34), who thinks that contemporaries used them as models. Also Banniard (1992:
292).
18 E.g. Duchesne (1910: 472) ‘unecorréspondance extraordinaire, peut-être fictive’.
19 They could always point to the antics of Bishops Salonius and Sagittarius in Greg. Tur. DLH 5.20.