From Ravenna's Schools to a Bishop's Chair in Poitiers

Venantius Fortunatus received a classical education at Ravenna, then still a center of late Roman learning, before crossing into Merovingian Gaul in 566, reportedly after a pilgrimage of thanks to Saint Martin of Tours for curing an eye ailment, though he never returned home and instead built the rest of his career among the Frankish courts and churches of Gaul. He settled eventually at Poitiers, drawn into the circle of Queen Radegund, a former Thuringian princess and estranged wife of the Frankish king Chlothar I who had founded the convent of the Holy Cross there, and of Agnes, its abbess. Fortunatus became the community's steward and its poet, writing extensively for and about Radegund and Agnes over some three decades, and was ordained a priest during this period. Late in his life, likely in the final years of the sixth century or very early in the seventh, he was elected bishop of Poitiers, a position that recognized both his standing in Gaul's church and the length of his service to its royal and religious households; he died shortly afterward.

Michael Roberts's modern edition of his complete poetry situates Fortunatus as a genuine bridge figure, trained in the vanishing world of classical Latin rhetoric but writing for an audience of Frankish kings and Gallo-Roman bishops who represented the new order replacing it, and his hymns are the part of that large body of work that has had by far the longest afterlife.