Visions of Unity after the Visigoths

Early Iberian Latin Chronicles and the Mediterranean World

By (author) Ksenia Bonch Reeves

Book cover: Visions of Unity after the Visigoths

Extent: 288, 288 pages

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Subjects: Literary Studies, Medieval Studies

Series: Cursor Mundi

Series volume number: 26

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(October 2016)

ISBN: 9782503565095

Price: $120.00

In stock

This study of Iberian Latin chronicles composed between the mid-eighth and mid-thirteenth centuries brings into critical focus the period after the fall of the Visigoths as a time characterized by an intense search for models of social cohesion amid diversity and political fragmentation.


This study focuses on post-Visigothic Latin chronicles as testimonies of an intense search for models of stability and social cohesion on the Iberian Peninsula. As the principal source of Iberian political thought between the eighth and mid-thirteenth centuries, these texts have long been regarded from the perspective of modern-day national boundaries of a political entity called Spain. From the post-national perspective of Mediterranean studies, which considers Iberian centres of power in cultural contact with the broader world, post-Visigothic Iberian chronicle writing is seen as a cultural practice that seeks to reconcile the imperative of unity and stability with the reality of diversity and social change. The book examines, firstly, the Andalusi Christian narrative of Visigothic political demise, which originated in Iberian dhimm? communities between the mid-eighth and mid-ninth centuries. Second, it explores the narrative of sovereignty, developed in Asturias-Leon from the late ninth century onwards. Finally, it examines the historiographical manipulation of both of these traditions in Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada’s Historia de rebus Hispanie (1243). The ongoing contact between Iberian Latin textual communities and the broader Mediterranean is interpreted as central to both the development of Iberian historical mythology and its historiographical renovation.

  • By (author) Ksenia Bonch Reeves