This book is about the relationship between popular culture and the shift from Roman cultural forms to a more “medieval” culture in late antique southern Gaul, a region chosen largely because it offers abundant evidence for a microregional study of the period. Popular culture as a category is good to think with about change over time, and that is exactly what Grig invites the reader to do in this thorough—and thoroughly thoughtful—exploration of the literary and archaeological sources of the period, supplemented when needed with comparative material and interpreted with the aid of anthropological theory.
Grig’s thesis is simple and nuanced: popular (or “unauthorized”) culture directly contributed to cultural change over time during the end of antiquity as more and more “do-it-yourself” forms of entertainment (as Grig calls them), often originating among non-elites especially in rural areas, replaced by-then-defunct official forms of public entertainment from the Roman era. But this argument is not the primary contribution of the book. The book’s value lies in the way Grig “thinks with” popular culture on different levels throughout the study. Her analysis gives rise to numerous questions, which she helpfully posits, and these questions contribute as much to our understanding of the role and development of popular culture in late antiquity as do the answers.
She opens the introductory, chapter with a series of questions that lay out the stakes of the book: “How can we understand the transformations that took place in late antiquity? How did the complex processes of social, economic, cultural and religious change interrelate? Can we understand these processes as activated from the bottom up, as well as the top down, and how did these divergent forces interact?” (1). This chapter also serves to introduce the period, the region, and the two key themes she will explore throughout the book, “christianization” (which she warns is not entirely top-down) and “democratization” (which comprised a mixture of top-down and bottom-up processes) (32-35).
The introduction also contains her defense and definition of popular culture, meticulously theorized here and in longer form in the introduction to her edited volume from 2017, Popular Culture in the Ancient World.[1] She adopts Stuart Hall’s theory of popular culture as both embedded in society as well as dynamic and existing at the point at which unauthorized culture, usually practiced among non-elites, and elite culture intersect and are negotiated (3).[2] She supplements Hall’s theory with those of other theorists to form a “multifaceted” and “broad-spectrum” understanding of popular culture (4-5). Rather than searching for a static, separate, and therefore artificial construction of non-elite culture, Grig analyzes specific activities and behaviors, such as singing, dancing, gift-giving, and challenging authority, among others, and how such activities reveal interactions with structures of power.
Chapters 2 and 3 give an overview of popular culture in urban (Chapter 2) and rural (Chapter 3) areas from literary, documentary, and archaeological sources. In each, Grig focuses on the physical landscape, the people who inhabited each landscape, their involvement with church administration and secular elites (categories that she helpfully separates and acknowledges did not completely overlap), including civic unrest, and leisure and entertainment. These chapters make the argument about the intersection of popular culture and change over time that she develops thoroughly in the three subsequent chapters.
Chapter 4, “Christianizing Popular Culture: The View ‘From the Pulpit’,” is the first of three analytical chapters in which Grig attempts to uncover the lived experiences of non-elite people and how those experiences might have contributed to cultural change in late antiquity. Here, she reads ecclesiastical sources, especially the sermons of Caesarius of Arles, “against the grain” in order to access aspects of popular culture as they were perceived by church leaders who criticized them. In this chapter, Grig argues that Caesarius and elite bishops constructed a class-based critique of popular culture, seeking to stigmatize “unauthorized” behaviors as lower-class and undesirable even when practiced by members of all social classes.
This argument appears more nuanced than those of Grig’s previous treatments of Caesarius’s moral sermons, a product of further consideration. [3] Rather than “wholesale reform, or even assassination, of popular culture” (Grig, 2013) or the “comprehensive attack on the habits, predilections and activities of his congregation” (Grig, 2018), this chapter argues for “both the opportunity and the ideological imperative to mould non-elite behaviour according to elite values […and] in a parallel process, the clear attempt by a new, often ascetically trained, Christian elite to mould what was correct—indeed, elite—behaviour, using what is ultimately the language of class” (117). This argument is supported by a thorough and well-considered analysis of Caesarius’s Admonitiones, especially his programmatic letter, Sermo 1. While I would argue that Caesarius was primarily concerned with people’s behavior in church and at Christian festivals, and that he wanted them to learn hymns and psalms in addition to, rather than instead of, popular songs, Grig nevertheless provides a satisfying explanation to the contrary, arguing that Caesarius adopted a pedagogy of substitution rather than prohibition of unauthorized behaviors (141).
In Chapter 5, Grig takes up the concept of “lived religion” adapting the framework provided by Robert Orsi in his research on miracles in the modern era (146).[4] She is most interested in how ordinary people, both individuals and communities, played a role in constructing their religious environment in the context of other aspects of their lives, especially the patterns of nature that defined the lives of agricultural societies (147). Two case studies demonstrate the characteristics of a lived religion. For each she argues that lived religion was not only a part of popular culture, but is also analogous to popular culture, and therefore can be used as a litmus for cultural change more generally (171). Case studies of lived religion therefore show how non-elites negotiated other aspects of their culture as well.
The first case study is on the celebration of the midsummer feast of the nativity of saint John the Baptist, to which Caesarius famously preached sermons in opposition. Grig’s starting point is Klingshirn’s analysis of the feast, which included bathing in rivers or marshes, as a Christian adaptation of an older practice that may once have held pagan significance but in Caesarius’s day commemorated the baptisms that saint John performed in the Jordan.[5] She takes a deep dive (no pun intended) into the significance of the date of John’s birth occurring near midsummer when the harvest was typically celebrated, the rituals of singing, dancing, and bathing in the river, and the various responses to the rituals, which operated on a “sliding scale of permissiveness,” with Caesarius marking only one extreme (159). She also suggests that these behaviors were primarily a lower-class activity and cites Caesarius’s admonition to his congregation to warn their neighbors, households, and any other relevant people as evidence that he was speaking to landowners about their dependents. I think that Caesarius was more likely referring to a larger group that included upper-status people as well as members of his own congregation. Grig also acknowledges this possibility (153).
The second case study concerns the miracle story about Caesarius’s staff that he had left behind being made into a cross by a rural family to protect them from a hail storm.[6] Grig analyzes this miracle not in the context of material relic-object miracles or cross miracles (though she acknowledges the importance of both), but rather in the context of supernatural methods for preventing storms. She uses textual and archaeological sources from all over the Mediterranean world in this period and comparative material from the Carolingian period to show how members of all classes participated in rituals to prevent hail, noting the significance of weather for agrarian society that disproportionally affected the lower classes (167-68). In each of these case studies, Grig argues, a range of actors worked together, from tenants to bishops, using ritual objects to enact a lived religion.
Chapter 6 is a third, more developed case study on popular celebrations, in this case the Kalends of January, a late antique festival that lasted well into the middle ages. Through a meticulous use of diverse sources—textual, material, and theoretical—Grig attempts to portray an “insider” view of the various behaviors exhibited at the festival, in particular masquerading in costumes, cross-dressing, and the giving and seeking of gifts. She both uses and challenges Bakhtin’s theory of the early modern Carnival celebration in order to examine how different cultural encounters would have played out at this festival in late antiquity.[7] With Bakhtin, she acknowledges the Kalends as a day of license where people could feel free to step outside of their normal social status, class, or gender, but does not agree that festivals of license were inherently oppositional, nor the opposite, as others have argued, designed by the elite to allow peasants to “let off steam” so that they would not rebel (188). Grig’s approach here, as throughout the entire work, is one of nuance. In her thoroughly thick description of the festival, elements of the subversive and cohesive are both evident. She notes that bishops’ opposition to the festival were primarily moral and based on the fear that that they might lead to sexual impropriety. As many members of the elite participated in Kalends masquerades and gift exchange, this is one example where the interests of the secular elites did not always align with those of the bishops (218). The book ends with a short conclusion (Chapter 7) in which Grig carries through this thread of the church elite/secular elite/non-elite triangle in summaries of each chapter.
Popular Culture and the End of Antiquity in Southern Gaul is a well-researched book that delivers on all fronts. Scholars of popular culture, religion—both lived and preached—and the transformation from Roman to medieval cultural forms in late antiquity, will all benefit from reading this book. Grig moves seamlessly through the literary sources, which she analyzes brilliantly, to the material evidence, to anthropological theory and then aligns each approach so readers can appreciate the full picture. Of course, we cannot know exactly what ordinary people did for fun in late antiquity, but that need not be an admission of defeat. To the contrary, Grig offers a hopeful reading that puts on display the wide range of possibilities for popular practices and the reactions that they spurred from church and secular elites, all while delineating a helpful conclusion about change over time through the evidence of popular culture in late antiquity.
Notes
[1] Grig, Lucy, (2017) “Introduction: approaching popular culture in the ancient world,” in Grig (2017) ed. Popular Culture in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
[2] Hall, Stuart, (1981) “Notes on deconstructing the ‘popular’,” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. R. Samuel (London: Routledge), 227-40.
[3] Grig, Lucy, (2013) “Approaching popular culture: singing in the sermons of Caesarius of Arles,” Studia Patristica 69: 197-204 and Grig, Lucy, (2018) “Caesarius of Arles and the campaign against popular culture in late antiquity,” Early Medieval Europe 26.1: 61-81.
[4] Orsi, Robert, (1997) “Everyday miracles,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. D. Hall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 3-21.
[5] Klingshirn, William, (1994) Caesarius of Arles: The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 225.
[6] V. Caes. 2.27.
[7] Bakhtin, Mikhail, (1968) Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).