An Italian Monk in Merovingian Gaul

This chapter considers Jonas of Bobbio not only as one of the most important writers of the seventh century but also as an individual and historical figure in his own right whom it is possible to frame within the wider social, cultural, and political developments of his lifetime. A native of Susa, an Alpine town in northern Italy, Jonas became a monk of Bobbio and personal assistant to successive Bobbio abbots before undertaking missionary work in northern Gaul with Bishop Amandus in the 630s. It is likely he became abbot of the double community of Marchiennes-Hamage, for which he may have written a rule for nuns, the Regula cuiusdam ad virgines, previously ascribed to Abbot Waldebert of Luxeuil. Jonas’s occasional personal writing gives us a good insight into the life of a seventh-century monk whose monastic duties and missionary work took him across Europe and brought him into contact with a wide network of ecclesiastical and political figures.