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

een seen as „bad‟ or „wrong‟ Latin, partly because there already existed an established
tradition of writing in such a way and partly because it was reflective of daily speech habits.
In the discussion, then, of linguistic consciousness in the monastic rules, it would seem clear
that the authors would have been aware that they were not writing in a language that would
now be termed as Classical Latin. However, this is not to say that they would have deemed
the language to be somehow incorrect; rather, they would have probably recognised it to be a
lower register of Latin, more akin to the spoken language and purposefully intelligible to the
uneducated, but nevertheless still conforming to some sort of widely-recognised standard.
5.9 The Latin of the Monastic Rules
It is often the case that discussions on the Latinity of later Latin texts focus on
divergence. That is to say, they seek either to highlight the differences between later Latin
and Classical Latin texts, or to demonstrate the presence of a language already displaying
elements of Romance, and thus being distinct from Latin. To take the lead from Harris
(1988: 2-3): “during the period between the collapse of the Empire and the emergence of the
first Romance vernacular texts in various parts of Europe, one must envisage a situation in
which this ever-present variation within Latin was accentuated as the language developed in
ever more divergent ways in different localities”. This concentration on divergence has
become commonplace and is in many ways perfectly understandable, an approach typical of
pedagogical circumstances in particular. As Blaise (1994) remarked at the start of his manual
on Christian Latin: “all students now study Latin starting from the time of the classical
writers; so it is by referring to classical usage that the reader will find here what is at variance
with it” (ibid.: xv); another wrote: “in this book [Medieval Latin] is treated as a series of
divergences from Classical Latin” (Sidwell 1995: 2).
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