(b Rome, c540; d Rome, 12 March 604). Saint, pope and Doctor of the Church. Born to a prominent Roman family, Gregory was named prefect of the city in about 570. In 575 he turned his family home into a monastery, and embarked upon a life of spirituality and asceticism. In 579 he was sent to Constantinople as papal representative at the Byzantine court, remaining there until about 586; during his stay he lived with monks from his own Roman monastery, having failed, apparently, to learn Greek. He was elected pope by popular acclaim after Pelagius II died in the severe epidemic of 589–90 that followed upon the overflowing of the Tiber.
Rome was in a dire state when Gregory assumed office, having suffered through more than half a century of war, famine, plague and siege. In spite of his poor health Gregory acted with great energy and resolve: he saw to the care of the sick and the feeding of the poor; he reorganized the civil administration of the city, restored the water supply and even supervised the preparation of defence against the Lombards. His enterprise did much to establish the medieval concept of a centrally important papacy, and he was an important founder of the Middle Ages in a second respect: his highly influential writings, with their pastoral, mystical and ascetical bent, functioned as a bridge between patristic and medieval literature.
During the 9th century Gregory came to be credited with yet another important contribution to early medieval civilization: he was identified as the single most important figure in the development of Roman liturgy and chant. Indeed the belief was that under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit he personally composed the so-called Gregorian chant. That view has been modified in modern times, but the Solesmes Benedictines, who were largely responsible for the 19th- and 20th-century restoration of the chant, continued to maintain that the chant was organized and revised during his reign and under his close supervision. More recently, many scholars, particularly those without monastic affiliation, have advocated a greatly reduced role for Gregory in the creation of the chant, attributing many important developments to late 7th-century Rome and even to the early 8th century. Still, most would be unwilling to deny him a role of some kind: a tradition that is so strong and pervasive, it would seem, must have at least some foundation in fact.
Yet the evidence to the contrary has continued to grow. Gregory's earliest biographers, the 8th-century Monk of Whitby and Paul the Deacon (d c799), were silent on the subjects of liturgy and chant; the founding of the Schola Cantorum, attributed to Gregory in the 9th century, appears now to have taken place two or three generations after his time; liturgical historians have now dated the establishment of the Roman sacramentary (the so-called Gregorian) and lectionary to the mid-7th century; and Gregory's own writings, most notably his treatise Liber regulae pastoralis and his voluminous collection of preserved letters, have remarkably little to say about liturgy and chant. In one letter Gregory forbids deacons to chant the psalms at Mass, restricting this function to lesser clergy, and in another he denies that certain liturgical practices of his time were adopted from Constantinople.
At the end of the 19th century, the Belgian musicologist F.-A. Gevaert was already seeking to resolve the seeming contradiction between the Gregorian legend and the evidence by arguing that Gregory II (715–31) or Gregory III (731–41) rather than Gregory I was the pope who presided over the redaction of the Roman chant (Gevaert, 1890). His voice was drowned, however, by a chorus of Benedictine refutation, and little attention was paid to his views until Bruno Stäblein took account of them several decades later (see Stäblein, 1968). At the beginning of the earliest graduals are short prefaces in which the composition of the book is attributed to a Pope Gregory. On studying these ‘Gregorius presul’ prefaces, Stäblein observed that the earliest of them (in I-Lc 490, from the late 8th-century) failed to mention the single trait for which Gregory was universally admired at the time – his writings – whereas the somewhat later Frankish versions of the preface refer to them explicitly. Historians of this period tell us, moreover, that Gregory I was virtually forgotten in 8th-century Rome, while the memory of Gregory II, who boldly fostered Roman interests against the pretensions of Byzantium, was still fresh. But why would Franks mistakenly assume the unspecified Gregory to be Gregory I? If indeed there was such a mistake, it can be explained by the fact that the Carolingian court circle was intellectually dominated by English scholars such as Alcuin of York, and that 8th-century England, unlike contemporary Rome, had not forgotten Gregory. He was cherished as the pope who had sent Augustine to convert the English; Venerable Bede (d 735) mentioned him frequently with considerable warmth.
A tradition so powerful as that of the Gregorian involvement in the development of Roman liturgy and chant is not easily dismissed, but it would seem that the historiographic context of the question should change: the case for Gregory should move from assumption to the production of evidence.
PL, lxxv, 42–59 [Paul the Deacon's life of Gregory]; 60–242 [John the Deacon's life of Gregory]
F.-A. Gevaert: Les origines du chant liturgique de l'église latine (Ghent, 1890/R)
G. Morin: Les véritables origines du chant grégorien (Saint Gérard, 1890, 2/ 1904)
F.H. Dudden: Gregory the Great: his Place in History and Thought (London, 1905/R)
C. Callewaert: ‘L'oeuvre liturgique de S. Grégoire’, Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique, xxxiii (1937), 306–26
H. Hucke: ‘Die Entstehung der Überlieferung von einer musikalischen Tätigkeit Gregors des Grossen’, Mf, viii (1955), 259–64
H. Hucke: ‘Zu einigen Problemen der Choralforschung’, Mf, xi (1958), 385–414
S.J.P. van Dijk: ‘Gregory the Great, Founder of tbe Urban “Schola Cantorum”’, Ephemerides liturgicae, lxxvii (1963), 335–56
H. Anglès: ‘Sakraler Gesang und Musik in den Schriften Gregors des Grossen’, Essays Presented to Egon Wellesz, ed. J. Westrup (Oxford, 1966), 33–42
B. Colgrave, ed.: The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, by an Anonymous Monk of Whitby (Lawrence, KA, 1968/R)
B. Stäblein: ‘Gregorius Praesul: der Prolog zum römischen Antiphonale’, Musik und Verlag: Karl Vötterle zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. R. Baum and W. Rehm (Kassel, 1968), 537–61
L. Treitler: ‘ Homer and Gregory: the Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant’, MQ, lx (1974), 333–72
J. Richards: Consul of God: the Life and Times of Gregory the Great (London, 1980)
J. McKinnon: ‘Antoine Chavasse and the Dating of Early Chant’, PMM, i (1992), 123–47
J. McKinnon: ‘ The Eighth-Century Frankish-Roman Communion Cycle’, JAMS, xlv (1992), 179–227
J. Dyer: ‘The Schola Cantorum and its Milieu in the Early Middle Ages’, De musica et cantu: Studien zur Geschichte der Kirchenmusik und der Oper: Helmut Hucke zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. P. Cahm and A.-K. Heimer (Hildesheim, 1993), 19–40
D. Hiley: Western Plainchant: a Handbook (Oxford, 1993), 503–13
J. McKinnon: ‘ Gregorius presul composuit hunc libellum artis musicae’, The Liturgy, ed. T. Heffernan (Cambridge, MA, forthcoming)
JAMES W. McKINNON