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Biography

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Volusianus (also Volusian or, in French sources, Volusien) was a Gallo-Roman aristocrat of senatorial rank who served as bishop of Tours in the later fifth century. He was related to Ruricius, bishop of Limoges, and belonged to the same milieu of high-born Gallo-Roman families that supplied many of the Catholic bishops of Aquitaine and the Loire valley. Almost nothing is recorded of his birth, education, or career before he became bishop. He succeeded Perpetuus, the prelate who had rebuilt the basilica of Saint Martin, and thus inherited a see already famous throughout Gaul for the cult of Martin of Tours. Gregory of Tours, writing a century later in his episcopal catalogue, states that Volusianus was of senatorial family and that he occupied the see for seven years.

His episcopate fell in a period of acute religious and political tension. Tours then formed part of the Visigothic kingdom, whose rulers were Arians, while Volusianus and the Gallo-Roman clergy and people of his diocese held the Nicene faith. Relations between the Visigothic court and Catholic bishops were frequently strained. Gregory records that the Goths drove Volusianus into exile. Later tradition explains the expulsion as the result of suspicion that he favoured the Franks, whose king Clovis was expanding his power and would shortly convert to Catholicism. The earliest narrative does not describe a formal trial or a violent death; it presents him as a bishop removed from his church and left to die away from his see.

Gregory does not name the place of exile. Subsequent hagiographical and martyrological accounts locate it at Toulouse, the Visigothic capital, and that identification became standard in the Latin West. The precise year of death is not given by any contemporary document; conventional dates in the mid-to-late 490s rest on combining Gregory’s seven-year figure with the approximate chronology of Perpetuus. Volusianus was succeeded at Tours by Verus. He has sometimes been styled a martyr in later calendars, though the oldest sources treat him as a confessor who ended his life in exile for the Catholic faith.

Veneration of Volusianus is ancient. His name stands in the Roman Martyrology on 18 January, the day on which his feast is kept, with the notice that he was taken by the Goths and rendered his soul to God in exile. No elaborate medieval legend grew up around him, and he is not associated with a wide range of specific patronages. His memory survives chiefly in the episcopal lists of Tours, in the local liturgical tradition of that church, and in the brief entry of the martyrology.

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