Talk:Ferreolus of Rodez

Date of Birth
Currently shown as ca 470 or 475, which is slightly out of step with a marriage in ca 531, and the dates of birth of his children ca 535. Is it likely that he had children at aged 60? sprocketonline (talk) 15:54, 5 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Ferreolus of Rodez may have been confused with his father Tonantius Ferreolus who was a youth in the 460's does not appear to have had a family that early. The marriage and birthdates of children are speculative.  He is known to have been an adult when he wrote and visited relatives (Apollinaris of Valence) in 520 -indicating that that is probably closer to the age when he started his family, but beyond that there are few hard dates for Ferreolus of Rodez and the chronology of much of his life is based on dates gleaned from the more definite careers of his brother Firminus of Uzes and from Ferreolus' children.  The key importance of Ferreolus of Rodez is that he is an attested (certainly by the above letter) non-ecclesiastic and therefor likely child producing member of a Gallo Roman aristocratic familia that played an important role in the political transition from late classical to medieval society in the west.  It might have been better to have named the eponymous founded of the family Tonantius Ferreolus the Praetorian Prefect of Gaul and then had a separate article on the "Ferreoli"  This family gets unfortunately conflated in the efforts of enthusiastic amateur genealogists to punch their lines back to antiquity which, the legitimate and carefully considered efforts of Depoin, Chaume, Mathisen, Kelly and Settipani to elucidate their family structures notwisthanding, may be a trifle premature. Some of our less erudite but equally enthusiastic amateurs enchanted with the democratic and participatory character of Wikipedia (As are we all)have felt the call to make sure all of this information is fully published. Unfortunately, "genealogical obsessives" as one editor put it, create a lot of problems for the measured exposition of material that is pretty close to the edge of what can or should be posted in Wikipedia in the first place.  The work of the aforementioned names and about 10 others (Heinzelmann, Geary, Werner, among others) are legitimate sources to cite for this period and society.  These scholars have worked at these problems for years, had the proper academic training, have access to texts in the original languages and the ability to decipher them and generally do not preface their studies with a 30 generation pedigree down to the present day.  Not everyone in academia agrees that onomastics and other indirect techniques are acceptable in the reconstruction or late antique or early medieval family units or even that genealogies from these periods can be accurately reconstructed in all but a small number of cases, but it is also arguable that people in these eras considered familial ties of primary importance (cf King Guntramn in Gregory of Tours History) and to ignore them or fail to make the effort to understand them is to fail to understand a pivotal era in western history. In any case, there is a great deal about the Ferreoli and their contemporaries that can be put in Wikipedia, and there is a great deal of legitimate research that is premature or does not reach the standards for posting.  To make sense of these articles I think it is necessary to review them with this in mind, to correct some of the more brutal anachronisms in the articles as they have been written to date, to try, where possible, to make clear the person's notability or role in Roman, Gothic or Merovingian society, and to heed the administrators' and other editors' call for adequate citation and support.  I have been working on doing that for this particular Gallo-Roman family for the past couple of months.GradyEdwardLoy (talk) 12:28, 13 May 2012 (UTC)