Sigebert of Gembloux
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Sigebert of Gembloux (Sigebertus Gemblacensis) (c. 1030 – October 5, 1112), was a medieval author, known mainly as a pro-Imperial historian of a universal chronicle, opposed to the expansive papacy of Gregory VII and Pascal II[1]. He became in early life a monk in the Benedictine abbey of Gembloux.
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[edit] Biography
He was born near Gembloux which is now in the Province of Namur, Belgium, about 1035. He was apparently not a German, but seems to have been of Latin descent. He received his education at the Abbey of Gembloux and at an early age became a monk in this abbey. Later he was for a long time a teacher at the Abbey of St. Vincent at Metz, and about 1070 he returned to Gembloux, he was universally admired and venerated, and had charge there of the abbey school until his death, occupied in teaching and writing.
After his return from Metz he became a violent imperial partisan in the great struggle between the empire and the papacy, i.e. an enemy of the papal pretensions he took part in the momentous contest between Pope Gregory VII and the emperor Henry IV. Of the three treatises on this question, being very serviceable to the imperial cause to the contest, one is lost; this was an answer to the letter of Gregory VII, written in 1081 to Bishop Hermann of Metz, in which Gregory asserted that the popes have the right to excommunicate kings and to release subjects from the oath of loyalty. In the second treatise Sigebert defended the masses of married priests, the hearing of which had been forbidden by the pope in 1074. When Paschal II in 1103 ordered the Count of Flanders to punish the citizens of Liege for their adherence to the emperor and to take up arms against him, Sigebert attacked the proceeding of the pope as unchristian and contrary to the Scriptures. He died at Gembloux on 5 November, 1112.
[edit] Works
Sigebert's most celebrated is a Chronicon sive Chronographia, or universal chronicle, according to Auguste Molinier the best work of its kind. It contains many errors and but little original information. He desired probably merely to give a chronological survey; consequently there is only a bare list of events even for the era in which he lived, though the last years, including 1105-11, are treated more in detail. It covers the period between 381 and 1111, and its author was evidently a man of much learning. The first of many editions was published in 1513 and the best is in Band vi. of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores, with introduction by Ludwig Conrad Bethmann.
The chronicle was very popular during the later Middle Ages; it gained a very high reputation, was circulated in numberless copies, and was used by many writers and found numerous continuators serving as the basis of many later works of history. Notwithstanding various oversights and mistakes the industry and wide reading of Sigebert deserve honorable mention.
Other works by Sigebert are a and a life of the Frankish king Sigebert III (Vita Sigeberti III regis Austrasiae). While at Metz he wrote the biographies of Bishop Theodoric I of Metz (964-85), of King Sigebert III, founder of the monastery of St. Martin at Metz, and also a long poem on the martyrdom of St. Lucy, whose relics were venerated at the Abbey of St. Vincent. After his return to Gembloux he also wrote similar works for this abbey, namely: a long poem on the martyrdom of the Theban Legion, as Gembloux had relics of its reputed leader St. Exuperius; (d. 962); a history of the early abbots of Gembloux to 1048 (Gesta abbatum Gemblacensium).
He also made a catalogue of one hundred and seventy-one ecclesiastical writers and their works from Gennadius to his own time, De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis, which mentions his own work.
Sigebert was also a hagiographer. Among his writings in this connexion may be mentioned revisions of the biographies of St. Maclovius and the two early bishops of Liege, Theodard and Lambert; further the Vita Deoderici, Mettensis episcopi, which is published in the Monumenta, vol. iv, and the Vita Wicberti, in Monumenta vol. viii; Dietrich, bishop of Metz (d. 984) who was the founder of the abbey of St Vincent in that city, and Wicbert or Guibert (d. 962) who founded the abbey of Gembloux.
[edit] Sources and references
- This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913. [1]
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- Denys Hay, Annalists and Historians: Western Historiography from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Centuries (London/New York) 1977.
