Gregory of Tours, ‘The Book of the Miracles of the Blessed Andrew the Apostle

The Book of the Miracles of the Blessed Andrew the Apostle (Liber de miraculis beati Andreae apostoli), long regarded as a sixth-century reworking of an earlier apocryphal work by an anonymous author, has often been ignored or used by scholars as a vehicle for recovering an earlier, now lost, work, The Acts of Andrew. Yet in recent years there has emerged a growing consensus that The Book of the Miracles of the Blessed Andrew the Apostle (hereafter noted as the MA) was authored by Gregory of Tours (538-594), the preeminent historical source for the sixth-century West. While Gregory and his hagiographical works have been studied with increasing vigor by scholars, the MA has only recently figured into that effort and, consequently, has not yet been fully translated into English.

This volume attempts to fill this void by offering the first full English translation of the MA, alongside Max Bonnet’s Latin edition, and by setting the work in its rightful place in Gregory’s canon. With an introduction, glossary, notes, and a map of places mentioned in the text, this volume provides an accessible entry point to both the study of the legacy of the apostles as well as Gregory of Tours’s interpretation of it. The MA is valuable for the study of early Christianity, late antiquity, and religious culture in the Merovingian Kingdom of the Franks.