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

Chapter Two: The Visigothic Monastic Rules and Their Visigothic Context
―I had chosen what used to be considered the darkest of all ―Dark‖ Ages, the seventh
2.1 Introduction
century, Spain under the Visigoths‖ (Hillgarth 1985b: vii)
This chapter will introduce the Visigothic monastic rules and investigate briefly what
the monastic rules can reveal about historical aspects of Visigothic monasticism. Since this
chapter is primarily background material, fuller historical investigations of Visigothic
monasticism can be found elsewhere. 40 Whilst it is true that Visigothic Iberia is no longer as
dark as Jocelyn Hillgarth, above, had found it once to be, the history of its monasticism is still
not as widely studied in the Anglophone world as its Merovingian and Anglo-Saxon
contemporaries (for example, Clarke & Brennan 1981; Foot 2006). An understanding of the
Iberian context is particularly important because of the minor role the Rule of Benedict had
there. Indeed, Benedictinization of the peninsula occurred primarily from the eleventh and
twelfth centuries and was “a slow, stubbornly resisted process” (Bishko 1984: 1). This has
impinged undoubtedly upon the historiography of Iberian monasticism. 41
Although the adoption of the Rule of Benedict elsewhere was certainly neither a
uniform nor necessarily rapid process in the early medieval period (Dunn 2000: 130-131), the
40 For example, Pérez de Urbel (1933-1934); Cocheril (1966); Linage Conde (1977); Bishko (1984);
de Cortázar, de Aguirre & Casuso (2006). For a discussion of economic and social aspects of
Visigothic monasteries in particular, see de la Cruz Díaz Martínez (1987).
41 In the sense that non-Benedictine monasticism is too often treated as liminal; thus Elm (1994: 8),
“the historiography of monasticism as a whole, regarding its history both before and after Benedict,
remains dominated and deeply influenced by the notions exemplified by Benedictine monasticism and
its related concerns [...] the notions […] broadly defined as Benedictine monasticism continue to be
the privileged vantage point from which everything else is defined as liminal”.
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