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

For this thesis, the problem seems to be initially relatively straightforward. Quite
simply, monastic rules are texts intended for a Visigothic monastic audience. This audience
was primarily localised, perhaps to a specific institution, and there is no evidence that the
authors intended the rules to be used outside their region, let alone the Iberian Peninsula.
Beyond this, however, the concept of the intended audience becomes weakened because
Visigothic monasteries did not, of course, like many communities, comprise a homogeneous
collection of people, but instead were a mixture of ages, education, experience and even sex.
These kinds of variations in audience must always be taken into account and will constitute a
thematic backbone of this thesis.
0.3 Rationale of the Thesis
There are a number of important questions involved in this thesis, in particular issues
of literary culture and language-use, as well as the Kontinuitätsproblem as a whole within the
Late Antique and early medieval world. These are all topics that arguably deserve a thesis by
themselves and are subject to increasing popularity (recently, Rousseau & Papoutsakis
(2009); Rousseau (2009)). In light of this, it could be argued perhaps that any thesis that
seeks to provide such a wide-ranging overview of different, albeit related, topics, can only
ever provide a cursory view of historical reality. This is perhaps true. However, the reason
that such a scope can justifiably be argued to be employed here is that the context is very
specific, dealing primarily with Visigothic monasteries, and this limitation means that such a
scope is viable. The traditional neglect of Visigothic monasticism in Anglophone
scholarship, and indeed of much of continental monastic history outside of an Anglo-Saxon
context, means that such an approach is, in the author‟s eyes, justified. As such, although the
v