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

Catalan history and write in Catalan, and the same is true for Galicia, Castile and the Basque
country. This fracturing of the academic landscape means that it can often prove initially
inaccessible to researchers. It also means that important secondary sources can often appear
in academic journals that are kept only by regional university libraries and are written in
minority languages.
The issue of regionalised studies has recently been discussed by Humphries (2009),
whose opinion it was that: “it is important to keep those tensions between cohesion and
fragmentation in view if we are not to arrive at a simplistic account of the events that
constitute the traditional grand narrative of Late Antiquity, in which the Roman Empire is
dismembered by foreign invaders” (ibid: 104). Indeed, one of the principal disadvantages of
this approach is that by studying Visigothic Iberia in isolation, it detaches the peninsula away
from its neighbours and thus inadvertently plays into the views of the post-Roman world as
one in discord, where the unity of Empire had disappeared. Although Rome might not have
been the centralising force that it once was, this is not to say that studying Iberia in isolation
implies that that the region was in anyway isolated from the wider world; far from it. This
was a region that hosted frequent Church Councils that drew participants from beyond its
borders; the writer Martin of Braga was an émigré from the east who had settled here;
Leander of Seville had conversely been sent east to Byzantium as an ambassador; the
peninsula played host to African refugees; the northwest coast was recipient of a number of
displaced British who created their own diocese. The list could go on, but it is hoped that the
specific focus on Iberia does not hint at its isolation from its wider European context.
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