Biography
Caletric of Chartres
About Caletric of Chartres
Caletric was a bishop of Chartres whose death moved the poet Venantius Fortunatus to write an unusually personal epitaph. Fortunatus says that he had come to know the bishop late and lost him too soon. His opening image is of grief interrupting the act of writing: the words intended for a living friend must now be addressed to someone buried.
The poem remembers a gentle voice, kindness, care for widows, and generosity toward the poor. It praises Caletric’s eloquence and his musical celebration of God, and gives his age as thirty-eight. These lines are a friend’s funeral praise rather than a full account of an episcopate.
A stone inscription offers a different kind of testimony. In the transcription published by Doublet de Boisthibault, it names Chaletricus as bishop and marks his resting place. Its wording commemorates his death without supplying a year. Some letters are missing, and the month was the subject of later scholarly debate.
Doublet’s nineteenth-century study argues that October was cut over an earlier September in the inscription. He describes surviving traces of the older letters and proposes that a change in the liturgical commemoration explains the alteration.
The French heritage inventory identifies the surviving object as Caletric’s sixth-century sarcophagus and records its discovery in 1703 during demolition of the chapel of Saint-Nicolas in the cathedral precinct. It is a stone coffin with a lid, now recorded in the lower room of the Saint-Piat chapel at Chartres Cathedral.
Caletric also appears in the cathedral’s stained glass. An account by Félicité Schuler-Lagier identifies his jeweled tunic in window 134 and explains such decoration as a medieval symbol of saintly virtue. The image belongs to the later visual memory of the bishop, not to evidence for his actual clothing.
Nominis preserves Caltry as another form of his name and records his feast at Chartres on 8 October. It also notes the presence of his relics in the cathedral. His death is usually placed around 573, and the Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 4 September.
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