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

separate languages through a combination of diachronic change and language reform, in this
case the reforms of Alcuin and Peter the Great. This overview of Church Slavonic has been
necessarily short, but, if anything, it highlights not only how unsuitable a black and white
approach of liminality is to the problem of relationships between written and spoken
languages in the early medieval period, but also that help can be drawn from comparisons to
other languages and their history.
6.15 Monastic Rules and Other Texts
It was demonstrated previously that a monk might have come into contact with
various texts in a monastery. Notwithstanding monastic rules, these include hagiography
and, above all, readings from the Bible. It was also noted in Chapter Five that the Latinity of
the monastic rules often has very little to differentiate it from other contemporary and
preceding Classical texts. This is particularly true for its morphology. It is fitting to enquire
whether the evidence presented by the monastic rules fits with the evidenced supplied from
other texts. There is not enough space in this thesis, of course, to scrutinise the language of
texts that might have been included in the office, for example, or even that of the Bible itself.
However, some brief remarks will be pertinent.
In the first instance, many of the linguistic features, and even peculiarities (at least
when compared with much Classical Latin literature), of the monastic rules were shared with
other texts with which a monk might have come into contact. This was due on the one had to
the period in which they were written (for example, the copulative use of uel, or the extended
use of the pronoun), and on the other hand to the influence of Christianity (for example,
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