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

date, it would make sense that there existed Iberian regular literature. Fear‟s argument that
the existence of cenobitic communities by this period suggests the concomitant existence of
monastic rules seems sound. However, the lack of surviving texts should not be taken as an
indicator to the fact that they did not once exist, and a possible comparison could be made
with the situation a couple of centuries later. The ninth-century writer Paul Albar, who was
active in Al-Andalus at the time of the Cordoban martyrs, noted that his friend and
contemporary, Eulogius of Cordoba, was accustomed to visiting monasteries and composing
monastic rules; 53 presumably this must have occurred on at least a few occasions, but no
evidence remains of any text. This kind of ad hoc regular literature is also attested to
elsewhere and seems to have been relatively common before the widespread acceptance of
the Rule of Benedict. 54 It is also possible that the monastic rules might have been destroyed
purposefully in the wake of the Benedictinization of Iberian monasticism, when pre-
Benedictine monastic rules were perhaps no longer considered orthodox, or perhaps even a
threat to the growing establishment of the Cistercians in particular. This occurred elsewhere,
for example with the Rule of the Templars. 55
2.4 The Monastic Rules and Their Historical Context
The three monastic rules present, from the perspective of their authors, an idealised
form of regulated monastic life. However, the extent to which they can be used as a basis to
53 Life of Eulogius 3, “exhinc cepit se [...] monasteria frequentare, cenobia inuisere, regulas fratrum
conponere”.
54 For example Bede Historia Abbatum 2, notes that abbot Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop composed
their own monastic rules.
55 This text was written in the early twelfth century following the Council of Troyes in 1129. There
exist no original manuscripts of the so-called Primitive Rule, which constituted the core text, despite
the fact that it would have been widely available at the time; unfortunately, all copies were
purposefully destroyed at the time of the Templar‟s demise (Upton-Ward 1992: 11).
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