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

oad [...] that it has often been taken as a general set of rules for nuns [...] but it is not a
detailed way of life for nuns, for its does not consider a daily and hourly regimen”. Others
have been less explicit through the absence of any reference to the work, such as Atienza
(1994: 82-85), who discusses Visigothic nunneries with no mention of it.
However, other scholars have adopted a different stance. In their critical edition of
the monastic rules of Visigothic Iberia, Ruiz and Melia (1971) included the De institutione
uirginum in their conspectus and Hillgarth was of a similar opinion (1980: 57): “The main
monastic rules coming from Spain are by Leander of Seville [...] Isidore of Seville [...]
Fructuosus of Braga [...] and the anonymous Regula monastica communis”. Wygralak (2006:
197) also argued it to be “dzieło [...] uważane przez wielu badaczy za regułę dla dziewic”.
There is evidently some discrepancy here: whilst some of the most authoritative monastic
scholars deny the text its place as a monastic rule, other individuals consider it to be just that.
Why does the De institutione uirginum of Leander pose such a problem? Ostensibly,
the text satisfies the requirements for consideration as regular literature: it is aimed clearly at
someone within a monastic setting and it is divided into thirty-one small chapters that relate
to the everyday realities of a nun‟s cenobitic life. Yet be this as it may, there are aspects of
the text that clearly differentiate it: the first half is a lengthy epistle of almost two-hundred
and seventy-eight lines and many of the chapters do not deal with pragmatic aspects of
monastic life, but rather are much more philosophical. These two points require to be
considered in turn
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