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

In the second instance, one of the principle differences often suggested for Galician
monasticism is the presence of pactualism. The pactum is the name given to a document
attached to the end of the Common Rule that constitutes a contract between the novitiate and
the abbot, highlighting precisely the expectations of both. It has been translated by Barlow
(1969: 207-209). The issues raised by pactualism are complex and have aroused substantial
debate, shaping the entire outline of pre-Cisterican Iberian monastic history (for a fuller
discussion, see Bernaldo 1991). Herwegen (1907) was the first to focus attention on the
issue, identifying a total of six pactual texts. He presumed the oldest, and hence original, to
be that attached to the Common Rule. Amongst the other texts he included was the
Consensoria monachorum, a similar text that was once attributed to Augustine but now
widely held to be contemporary with the pactum (Bishko 1948a). He proposed three central
tenets: Gründungsformel, the foundation of an ascetic community; Professformel, the
commitment, or traditio, of the convert to ascetic life; Wahlinstrument, the declaration of the
choice of abbot. For Herwegen, the pact mirrored the Germanic warrior habit of swearing an
oath before the collective leader, and so “the Luso-Gallegan monastic pactum [...] embodied
the substitution of Germanic juridical concepts for the Roman law principles of normal
monasticism, and brought into being a peculiarly bilateral or synallagmatic contractual
cenobial policy, in sharp contrast with that founded upon the canonical monarchical
abbatiate” (Bishko 1984: 4). It was his opinion that pactualism disappeared under the rise of
Bendectinisation in the eleventh century.
Bishko (1984) took Herwegen‟s theory one step further after having identified even
more pactual texts and noting its rather sudden appearance in ninth- and tenth-century La
Rioja and Castile. It was his opinion that pactualism originated in north-west Iberia but was
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