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

egardless of modern political sensibilities. Sometimes there is a reason for a more localised
title, such as The Archaeology of Early Roman Baetica (Keay 1998) or La Navarre du IVe au
XIIIe siècle (Larrea 1998). However, normally a more generalising nomenclature is
employed, such as Spain in the Middle Ages. From Frontier to Empire, 1000-1500 (MacKay
1977); Roman Spain: Conquest and Assimilation (Curchin 1991), Early Medieval Spain:
Unity in Diversity, 400-1000 (Collins 1983), or Late Roman Spain and its Cities (Kulikowski
2004). One work, Death, Society and Culture: Inscriptions and Epitaphs in Gaul and Spain,
AD 300-750 (Handley 2003), even uses the Roman „Gaul‟ on the one hand, and the modern
„Spain‟ on the other. All of these deal not with Spain as the recognisable political entity that
it has been for the past five-hundred years or so, but rather the Iberian Peninsula more
generally. This frustrates Portuguese and other readers in the same way as it would the
Welsh reader finding chapters about Wales in a book entitled „The History of England‟. Not
only do these titles defy modern political boundaries, but they would have made much less
sense for the people they are writing about: Isidore of Seville certainly understood the word
Spania, but he would not have recognised this necessarily to be a separate entity contrasted
with Portugallia, for example (Pohl 2006).
The term Hispania is an attractive alternative, especially when dealing with the
Roman period, but its adjective „Hispanic‟ is nowadays too culturally and politically loaded
to refer with any clarity to specifically early medieval topics, and it is more likely to be found
in works concerning modern North American culture. Indeed, phrases such as „Hispanic
monasticism‟ or „Hispanic authors‟ seem far too fuzzy to be used with any clarity. Since it
was the Roman term for the peninsula, it also refers to a political situation that was very
distinct from the Visigothic one. Instead, by far the easiest terms are „Iberia‟ and „Iberian‟
and these have been used throughout: since it is a geographical term, it avoids most ethnic
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