A group of renowned North American scholars gathered at the University of Notre Dame in 1993 for a symposium on Pope Gregory the Great (550-604). The essays collected in this volume are arranged in the order in which they were delivered, and several additional contributions are included as well. In these essays Gregory emerges as a figure both interpreting and interpreted: interpreting the past, receiving, synthesizing, and developing the teachings of earlier writers, and, by this very process, presenting a persuasive theological and pastoral agenda which itself inspires ongoing projects of interpretation and development in later periods up to and including our own.