ABSTRACT
Such was the caustic response of the Reverend Frederick Holmes Dudden, BD, to an episode recorded in the 590s in Rome by Pope Gregory the Great in the Dialogues.2 Dudden’s magisterial and still unreplaced book on Gregory – in his own words ‘not merely … a biography … but also’, thanks to the amplitude of its source quotation, ‘in some degree … a work of reference’ – generally evinces admiration for ‘the most remarkable man of a remarkable age’.3 Still, for Dudden, in this episode of a healer in a hospital Gregory showed a lamentable incapacity for weighing evidence given by others and for drawing valid inferences from personal observation.4 Dudden was an Oxford scholar of wide sympathies who deserves the attention of historiographers.5 His monographs ranged in subject
* I am grateful to Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, Clare Pilsworth, and Chris Wickham for indispensable comments on a draft of this chapter.
