Gregory of Tours was a southern Gallic aristocrat (born c. 538) turned bishop of Tours (573-594) whose diocese rested precariously along one of the Frankish kingdoms’ shifting frontiers. He was a prolific writer whose surviving corpus includes ten books of history, ten books about saints and their miracles, a book for calculating times for evening prayers, and a commentary on the psalms. In part because Gregory's writings are so voluminous and terribly significant for understanding the era – the Historiae are essential to any reconstruction of a sixth-century Gallic political narrative –, scholars frequently have aligned their thoughts about the author with their estimations on the condition of the society in which he lived. Prior to the late twentieth century, researchers turned to the Historiae far more than to the Miracula in order to gather evidence about Gregory's world. They took the bishop's many humble references to his literary shortcomings literally and accepted the Historiae's many depictions of murder and mayhem as simple reflections of barbarous times. As a result scholars built a virtual consensus which labelled Gregory an incompetent writer, an untalented spokesperson for a “dark age” – a casualty of his own credulous and violent era –, a gullible believer in saints and miracles, and a historian ill prepared for the task which he alone undertook in sixth-century Gaul, to write a “history of the Franks.”

Dismantlement of this former near-consensus began in earnest during the 1970s with the work of two stalwarts, Peter Brown and Walter Goffart. Brown helped rescue “Gregorian studies” from the traditional position by folding analysis of the Gallic author's writings into a revolutionary reevaluation of hagiography of his own making whereby saints’ lives become valuable sources for scholars of late ancient societies. Specifically Brown dismissed earlier imaginings of Gregory as a practitioner of a naive brand of Christianity, and instead assigned to him a persona that today's scholars uniformly regard as one of the bishop's most essential guises, an adept participant in the cult of saints. Equally momentous was Walter Goffart's endeavor which thoroughly debunked a prevailing image of Gregory as author of a nationalistically attuned history.