Present and Precedent in the Church Councils of Late Antique Iberia
University of Kent, 12-13 July 2024
RHS Workshop Grant Recipient for 2024
Graham Barrett and Jamie Wood
In this post, Graham Barrett and Jamie Wood outline their recent workshop on the compact between Church and Crown in late-antique Iberia.
This workshop, funded by the Society’s Workshop Grant programme, enabled participants to collaborate in an investigation of the agreements surrounding the Visigothic kingdom, know as the Hispana.
Written in dense and difficult Latin, the Hispana has never been translated into English, nor the modern critical edition into any language. With the workshop, the project seeks to form a research network to make the Hispana accessible through English translation, annotation, and contextual studies.
RHS Workshop Grants are awarded annually to enable historians to meet together to develop research ideas or projects; the next call for applications will be in late 2024.
Our Project
The seventh-century Visigothic kingdom in Iberia was ruled by a compact between Church and Crown, and the key source for the dynamics of this relationship is known as the Hispana, a collection of debates and decisions of Church councils from the fourth century onwards. These records of canon law defined dogma on orthodoxy and heresy, spirituality, liturgy and monastic practice, and the administration of the Church. In addition, they placed limits on the monarchy, alongside a host of other matters which the bishops thought important.
Scholarly attention has focused on the general councils held at the Visigothic capital of Toledo from the kingdom’s initial consolidation in 589 until its final collapse in 711. However, the compilation is much larger, including the acts of councils from the Greek East, North Africa, Gaul and pre-Visigothic Iberia. Its influence also extended beyond the fall of the Visigothic kingdom, with significant engagement across Carolingian Europe and in medieval and early modern Iberia.
Written in dense and difficult Latin, the Hispana has never been translated into English, nor the modern critical edition into any modern language. We seek to address this gap by forming a research network for making the Hispana accessible through English translation, annotation, and contextual studies.
A Visigothic Church council in progress, according to the Codex Vigilanus of 976 (Patrimonio Nacional. Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial, d-I-2, fol. 344r.)
Our Workshop
With the generous support of the Royal Historical Society, we took advantage of the Seventeenth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, being hosted this year at the University of Kent in Canterbury, to hold a one-day workshop of source study and research planning after the conclusion of the conference.
Building on the University of Lincoln’s unique strength in medieval Iberian studies, we recruited a global group of scholars to study the Hispana collaboratively. By tackling the materials together, we were able to compare approaches, questions, and anticipate challenges, and so set the parameters for our longer-term project. Our guiding principle was to address evidence ordinarily confined to Church history from the perspective of social context, exploring how canon law not only regulates but also reflects and reacts to the situations in which it was produced and transmitted.
The exterior of St Martin’s Church, Canterbury, believed to be the church mentioned in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, used as the private chapel of Frankish princess Bertha, her chaplain Liudhard, and Augustine of Canterbury in the late sixth- early seventh centuries. (Image by Dr Carolyn La Rocco)
Our Findings
Our workshop was arranged into four working parties, which explored how bishops and kings at the Church councils employed the past to frame power and belief in the present. While the Hispana was first assembled, then revised in the seventh century, it is made up of three centuries of earlier material, and each one of its constituent councils must be read in light of this chain of continuity.
The working parties, deliberately straddling the notional divide of the Visigothic conversion to Nicene orthodoxy in 589, examined how the assembled bishops formulated canon law for their own day in dialogue and at times in dispute with precedent. Each of the working parties addressed a key theme that cuts across the councils – power, property, the figure of the bishop, precedent in tension with innovation – to draw out how conciliar action endeavoured to regulate the present even as it was constrained by the past.
Two concluding plenary sessions enabled participants to feed back to each other, as groundwork for the next steps of our project: first, producing a team translation of one of the sixth-century councils, then outlining a new approach to the field by jointly authoring an article on the social life of canon law, and finally putting together a special issue that will bring together the presentations from our workshop. We also discussed the next steps to take in laying the groundwork for our longer-term goal of translating the entire Hispana, and what shape a companion volume of studies should take.
Our Participants
The workshop was ably hosted by Edward Roberts (University of Kent) and Abigail Firey (University of Kentucky).
Working Party #1. Before 589: Authority and Connectivity in the Pre-Visigothic Church. Pablo Poveda Arias (Universidad de Valladolid), Rodrigo Furtado (Universidade de Lisboa), Purificación Ubric Rabaneda (Universidad de Granada).
Working Party #2. The Secular Church: Property and its Problems in the Iberian Church. Carolyn La Rocco (University of St Andrews/St John’s College, University of Oxford), Marta Szada (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń), Jamie Wood (University of Lincoln).
Working Party #3. Bishops in Council: Constraints and Contexts for Episcopal Action. Michael Wuk (University of Lincoln/Freie Universität Berlin), David Addison (All Souls College, University of Oxford/University of Liverpool), Graham Barrett (University of Lincoln/Durham University).
Working Party #4. The Problem of Precedent: Tradition and Innovation in Dialogue. Margarita Vallejo Girvés (Universidad de Alcalá de Henares), Eleonora Dell’Elicine (Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento), Molly Lester (United States Naval Academy).
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Graham Barrett is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Lincoln, specialising in the social and cultural history of the Latin language from late-Antiquity to the high Middle Ages. His research focuses on the history of writing and text, primarily in the Mediterranean and Iberian Peninsula.
Prior to his role at the University of Lincoln, Graham was Junior Research Fellow in Medieval History at St John’s College, Oxford.
Graham has published widely on the topic of writing and text during this period, his most recent monograph being Text and Textuality in Early Medieval Iberia: the Written and the World, 711-1031 (2023).
Jamie Wood is Professor of History and Education at the University of Lincoln. His research focuses on the social, cultural, and religious history of late-Antique and early Medieval Mediterranean, with particular insight into Medieval Spain.
Prior to joining the University of Lincoln, Jamie taught at the Universities of Sheffield, Warwick, Liverpool, and Manchester where he also completed a Leverhulme Early Career Postdoctoral Fellowship entitled ‘Cultivating Conflict in Late Roman Spain’.
Jamie has written extensively on Isidore of Seville and the Iberian episcopacy. His recent edited collection, Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds, was co-edited with Kate Cooper (2020). He is currently working on a new monograph on about the Byzantine presence in the Iberian Peninsula in the sixth and seventh centuries.
ABOUT RHS WORKSHOP GRANTS
Workshop Grants enable historians to come together to pursue projects of shared interest. Projects are broadly defined and may focus not only on academic research but also a wider range of activities. Grants offer £1,000 for hosting a day event.
Workshops support a wider range of group activities relating to history. These may include:
- discussion of an existing research topic or project;
- beginning and testing a research idea, leading to a future project;
- developing new teaching practices;
- piloting work relating to the teaching, research or communication of history;
- planning and writing a grant application;
- undertaking networking and building of academic communities.
Grant Recipients for 2024
The following six projects have been awarded funding for 2024:
- Arunima Datta (University of North Texas) for ‘(Re)Visioning London through “Black” Dialogues’
- Helen Glew (University of Westminster) for ‘Pat Thane: Reflections on History, Policy and Action’
- Elizabeth Goodwin (York St John University) for a ‘Network Building Symposium for Historians in Post 92 Institutions’
- Claire Kennan (King’s College, London) for ‘A Workshop in Ruins’
- Aparajita Mukhopadhyay (Kent) for ‘Mobilising Imperial History: Crime, Policing and Control in the British Empire’
- Jamie Wood and Graham Barrett (University of Lincoln) for ‘Present and Precedent in the Church Councils of Late Antique Iberia’
The next call for applications will be made in late 2024.
HEADER IMAGE: Sala del Museo de los Concilios y la Cultura Visigoda (Hall of the Museum of Visigothic Church Councils and Culture), Iglesia de San Román, Toledo, España. Photograph by Santiago Lopez-Pastor uploaded 2014), CC BY-ND 2.0.