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

Accordingly, there was no need for a distinction between written Latin and spoken
Romance until it was brought about forcibly through the reforms of the English monk Alcuin,
who was active intellectually at the court of Charlemagne in the last part of the eighth
century: “This book examines the implications of a single hypothesis: that “Latin” as we have
known it for the last thousand years, is an invention of the Carolingian Renaissance” (Wright
1982: ix). Alcuin had been surprised at the difference between his Latin as a learnt, second-
language, and that of the Latin spoken natively at the Carolingian court. His De
Orthographia, which served to standardise Latin orthography and pronunciation, created a
sudden and conscious divide between Latin and the spoken language and heralded the
conceptual birth of Romance. In Iberia, this process occurred much later, c. 1080 at the
Council of Burgos, following educational reforms and the decision to replace the Visigothic
liturgy with the Roman one.
That is the Wright thesis in its most basic form. In many ways, Wright and Banniard
share a common approach: both believe that, up until the Carolingian period, there were few
problems in intelligibility between text and audience. Where they differ, however, is that the
Wright thesis suggests that there were indeed differences, but these were masked by the
active glossing of written forms that were no longer present in the spoken language.
Banniard, meanwhile, suggests that such differences did not exist, or rather, did not exist to
the extent so as to impede intelligibility. One of the greatest attractions, and also weaknesses,
of the Wright thesis, then, is that it satisfies both of the two-norm assumptions: either people
have always been speaking Romance but simply writing in Latin (thèse différencialle), or else
the actual distinction occurred only in the Carolingian period (thèse unitaire).
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