The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

importance do not necessarily translate diachronically to reflect the interests or concerns of
the culture that is attempted to be understood. As such, modern academic writing dedicated
to ancient technical literature can prove elusive. 281 Nevertheless, despite a lack of interest for
their literary heritage, technical texts have normally been studied principally for their
philological insight: “technical authors had […] long been recognised as being of great
importance for the study of the later Latin language, but they had been […] treated chiefly as
evidence for popular, or „vulgar‟, Latin” (Langslow 2000: 1).
4.4 Cato‟s De Agricultura and the Monastic Rules: A Stylistic Comparison
The literary techniques of the monastic rules will be discussed below, but first
attention turns to their style. A distinction must be made in the study of a text‟s style and a
text‟s technique. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, style includes “those features
of literary composition which belong to form and expression rather than the thought or the
matter expressed”; technique, however, is the “manner of artistic execution or performance in
relation to formal or practical details”. All written texts are stylistic, in the sense that they
possess features of organisation or language that are typical of them. The literary theorist
Terry Eagleton brought into question the extent to which a bus timetable could be considered
as stylistic, an issue that recently came into public debate when it was discovered that a
similar type of text was being included on an English literature exam paper. 282 Literary
technique, however, is something entirely different, if by the phrase is understood a
281 It is surprising, for example, that Cato‟s De agricultura is not included in the relevant chapter of
the new Blackwell‟s A Companion to Latin Literature (Goldberg 2005), despite the fact that
elsewhere it is normally recognised as the first surviving example of Latin prose literature (Gratwick
1982a: 141).
282 The BBC reported the story on Friday 7 th November 2008; it can be found at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7715362.stm.
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