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

education. From the perspective of deponent verbs and the synthetic passive, the Banniard
model of vertical communication and passive competence functions better than the Wright
thesis. It seems clear that many of the Late Antique and early medieval Christian writers
expected their audience to be able to more or less understand their texts, and it is been argued
that this was certainly the case for the authors of the seventh century Visigothic monastic
rules.
The evidence of deponent and synthetic passive forms therefore suggests that the
audience of the monastic rules would have been speakers of a language identifiable as Latin.
Although this language may have contained elements that are regarded now to be features of
Romance, as it had done for many centuries, it also contained important elements that
distinguished it from what scholars would now call Romance, such as the presence of
deponent verbs and the synthetic passive. Issues of early medieval language use can never be
about creating strict dichotomies of language use because this is an impossible task and one
with which even dialectologists studying modern languages struggle. Rather, it must be
asked when accommodation between the written and spoken forms had become impossible.
There can be no doubt that this would have occurred at different speeds in different regions
but the evidence of the monastic rules points to the fact that any linguistic discourse that took
place between a Visigothic audience and the text did so in a language that can be properly
called Latin, not Romance.
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