ABSTRACT
In a contemporary history of late sixth-century Gaul, there is a story about a Frankish king that begins with one kind of contagion and ends with another. Certain canons in two sixth-century Gallic councils, however, indicate that the concept of pollution did not only pertain to a state of carnal desire and its influence upon the condition of the heart. The notion of a mind-body continuum is only one of the images of self in late sixth-century sources. The concubinage of the more difficult to supervise rural clergy is dealt with separately and in a different manner. The practice is explicitly censured as incompatible with their consecrating the Lord's body, and designated as the Nicolaite ‘heresy’ which had been anathematized and cursed by ‘the statutes of the Fathers’.
