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

Similar problems can be posited for the Iberian Peninsula. The seventh-century Forum
Iudiciorum uses an interesting phrase when it says: “Nullus prorsus ex omnibus regni nostri,
praeter hunc librum qui nuper est editus, atque secundum seriem huius amodo translatum
librum alium legum, pro quocumque negotio in iudicio offerre pertemet”. 172 What exactly is
meant by “amodo translatum” is impossible to confirm. Latin transfero can imply „to copy
(books)‟, and so the phrase probably refers to forthcoming or updated editions (“henceforth
translated”). Scott (1910), however, interpreted the phrase to mean “an authorised
translation”. Since the law code was first written in Latin, it can be supposed that Scott
thought this to refer to a language other than Latin. The probable inference is Gothic.
However, although the Forum Iudiciorum was written in the mid-seventh century, it
comprised previous law-codes dating back to those first put down into writing by Euric in the
fifth century when Gothic was likely to have been far more common. It may be, then, that
this phrase is simply a piece of legalese. Although it is this author‟s opinion that the phrase
probably does not refer to linguistic usage, Scott‟s translation nevertheless draws to attention
that fact that the use of languages other than Latin needs to be accounted for in any study of
Visigothic Iberia.
In monasteries, it must be imagined that any literature would have been almost
certainly written in Latin, rather than Greek. A certain level of knowledge of Greek was
evidently still available in Iberia during the Visigothic period, in no small part due to the fact
that a minority of it was in the hands of a Byzantine enclave (Previale 1951). Additionally,
Martin of Braga was a native Greek-speaker from Pannonia and had translated from Greek
into Latin the Sayings of the Desert Fathers in his Sententiae. Leander, Isidore‟s elder
172 Liber Iudiciorum 2.1.9.
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