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

which dealt with the regulation of a mining community at Aljustrel in modern Portugal. This
law exempts school masters from civic duties, again hinting at the fact that an education was
available even in such a remote and industrial community (ibid.: 59).
Lay literacy in the Visigothic period is particularly well attested thanks to the pizarras
visigodas, or inscribed Visigothic slates. These are comparable to the Vindolanda tablets, the
North African Albertini tablets, and the Novgorod gramoty, 180 which are often taken as
indicators for sustained pragmatic literacy levels (Garrison 1999; Conant 2004). A new
critical edition and translation of the slates has recently been published (Velázquez Soriano
2004). The one hundred and sixty three slates, dating primarily from the sixth and seventh
centuries, cover a variety of topics, including letters and legal writings. However, they
include importantly far more “ephemeral written topics” (Ward-Perkins 2005: 164) outside
formal, judicial, texts, that suggest a sustained use of literacy throughout many levels of
society. These include the famous notitia de kaesos, as well as other lists concerning items
such as cattle, prayers and curses. These texts have survived because of the durable
conditions of the material upon which they were written, and they require the question to be
asked: how much evidence has been lost that was written on less durable materials that would
otherwise support such literacy rates amongst the lay population? Elements of lay literacy
are suggested further by scenes such as that found in the Life of Fructuosus, when it is retold
how the saint‟s father, a military leader, sat down with a shepherd and discussed his
records. 181
180 These are a collection of around one thousand texts, including letters, school exercises and official
documents, written on birch bark and found preserved in the boggy soil of the Russian city Novgorod
that have come to light since the 1950s. The collection has been digitised and is available on-line at
http://gramoty.ru/.
181 1, “pater autem suus greges describebat et pastorum rationes discutiebat”.
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