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

early medieval spoken language of the twentieth century, not only for understanding how a
change from Latin to Romance might have occurred, but more importantly also for
understanding how texts were used in such a context. The Wright thesis has been widely
lauded in Anglophone scholarship, although this is not to say that it is without criticism
(Quilis Merín 1999: 169-228). Modern literature shows the danger that some scholars have
come to accept the Wright thesis as fact, as though the problems of language in the early
Middle Ages were now a virtual closed book. 556
Wright‟s basic thesis is that in pre-Carolingian communities there existed no conceptual
distinction between Latin and Romance and that everyone spoke a regionalised dialect of the
vernacular; those who had access to education learnt how to write in an often archaic way,
not necessarily reflective of their speech habits, for example with the use of inflectional
morphology and pre-defined spellings. However, when a text was read, potentially archaic or
disappeared forms, which were no longer current in the spoken language, were glossed into
appropriate forms. Since only those who were educated sufficiently were able to read, they
would have been educated sufficiently to be able to gloss the forms.
556 Thus Smith (2005: 24) notes that “regional divergences in the spoken lingua romana gradually
became even stronger in Antiquity, and pronunciation changed too, but not so much as to cause
incomprehension between speakers from different regions. That started to happen only around 1200”.
Presumably, the author was making reference to Wright‟s dates of the Lateran Council of 1215 and
the Council of Valladolid in 1228, to which he places the beginning of the Latin and Romance
distinction. Since Wright is not even referenced in the section, there is a suggestion that Wright‟s
theory has been presumed to be fact. Lόpez-Morillas (2000) discusses the history of Latin in the
Iberian Peninsula prior to the Arab invasions and bases the entire article on the Wright thesis, without
reference to its problems. Lloyd (1984: 377) in an early review of Wright‟s work, wrote: “it all seems
so clear and obvious now, as Wright has explained it, that I can only wonder why anyone ever thought
any differently”.
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