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

ancient writers, had long ago stated the ideal kind of approach a historian should practice, 446
but this is a feat easier said than done: although scholars will naturally study what is of
interest or importance to them, it is always vital to recognise that methodological approaches
are often contextual to the scholar‟s society.
In this way the issue mirrors the explosion of the scholarly study of identity, ethnicity
and, in particular, „Romanization‟, topics that started to become enormously popular around
thirty years ago. Arguably, this fashion was a result of a generation of scholars brought up in
an environment of, for example, post-World War II ethnic diasporas, enhanced racial tensions
in the West, the social and political reassertion of fringe nations in Britain and the oppression
of others in the USSR. The extraordinary social situations of these generations gave way to
scholarly approaches that were vastly different from those fostered, for example, by scholars
working at the height of the British Empire (Woolf 1998: 4-16; Jones 1997).
Modern academic approaches to the Late Antique and early medieval period in
particular have obsessed over nomenclature and typologies that support the notion of
liminality, a teleological approach that tends to categorise language by its end product, no
matter how distant that might have been to contemporary speakers. This is because these are
important issues to modern scholars, who advocate the empirical study of linguistics in a
446 How to Write History 41, “That, then, is the sort of man the historian should be: fearless,
incorruptible, free, a friend of free expression and the truth, intent, as the comic poet says, on calling a
fig a fig and a trough a trough, giving nothing to hatred or to friendship, sparing no one, showing
neither pity nor shame nor obsequiousness, an impartial judge, well disposed to all men up to the
point of not giving one side more than its due, in his books a stranger and a man without country,
independent, subject to no sovereign, but reckoning what this or that man will think, but stating the
facts”.
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