10 - Romanness in Visigothic Hagiography

Summary

Abstract

This chapter evaluates the use (or not) of Roman identities and institutions in Visigothic hagiography. Visigothic hagiographical materials display a telling absence of ‘Romanness’, understood as a collective or individual consciousness of belonging to a Roman cultural tradition. This absence is tied to the erosion of ethnic binaries during the political construction of the Gothic kingdom, a process in which both the Roman aristocracy and the Catholic episcopate participated. I argue that in the seventh century, invocations of Roman heritage did not represent a continuation of ethnic conflict; rather, the hagiographers in their treatment of Rome's legacy were less interested in articulating the Roman identities of contemporary individuals than in placing their subjects within a world with recognizably Roman features.

Keywords: Romanness; Visigothic kingdom; hagiography; Christianism; Late Roman aristocracy; ethnicity

In the first third of the seventh century, a cleric from the ecclesiastical and monastic complex of St Eulalia, in Emerita (Mérida), in southwestern Hispania, felt it appropriate to note the Roman origin of one of the figures in the text that he was writing, the Lives of the Fathers of Mérida, a series of accounts of the lives of ecclesiastics from sixth-century Mérida. This anonymous hagiographer made explicit reference to the Roman origins of the dux Claudius, a military leader and governor in the service of the Gothic king Reccared (r. 586–601) in the province of Lusitania, stating that he was of noble lineage and had been born to Roman parents: ‘Idem vero Claudius nobili genere hortus Romanis fuit parentibus progenitus.’

The Mérida hagiographer's invocation of the Lusitanian dux's ‘Roman’ parentage is strikingly unique within the text, and his evident desire to underscore a figure's Roman heritage is more suggestive than it may seem. Given that the Iberian peninsula was (depending on the region) subject to Roman rule for more than half a millennium, we might expect to find a strong sense of Romanness among its inhabitants well into the post-Roman period. I will refer to ‘Romanness’ as a collective or individual consciousness of belonging to a Roman cultural tradition. Such tradition(s) could have been received through numerous ways, such as the persistence of Roman law, the memory of aristocratic families of Roman origins, and the cult of late Roman saints, among others.