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Visigothic Symposium 4 (2020-2021)
The Liber Iudiciorum or the Lex Visigothorum? The Origines or the Etymologies? De Origines Officiorum or De Ecclesiasticis Officiis? De Origine Gothorum or Historia Gothorum? Should we refer to Recceswinth’s code of 653 in the same vein as its revisions, or of Isidore’s origines as constitutive of his historical oeuvre? Was there a Toledan revision of Isidore’s histories in the early 630s? Were Isidore’s Sententiae the immediate product of a lifetime of thought or the culmination of decades of deep contemplation and revision? What happened at the Third Council of Seville, and why is only its echo recorded? To what extent did scribal work on the conciliar subscriptions alter our ability to uncover the true relationship between participants and their networks? Which is the Liber referred to by the anonymous chronicler of 754, that is, which record of the Iberian councils, the so-called Hispana, and could that have shaped her or his historical determinations? Why was Helladius impossibly made the author of a hagiography about his later successor Ildefonsus and what was the historical effect of this?
Scribes and editors play a massive role in the infinite project that is history-writing, providing historians with the very language by which we can interpret the past. Working from a selection of manuscripts and editions of Visigothic texts, the contributions in VgS 4 discuss, on the one hand, the issues and questions that we – as historians and philologists, and as editors – deal with when confronting as sources, manuscripts and editions, and their scripts, materialities, performances, etc. On the other hand, essays evaluate the choices of previous editors, from the sixteenth-century forward, and propose new theses on how those decisions affect our understanding of the history of late antique and early medieval Iberia.
