Framing Power in Visigothic Society: Discourses, Devices, and Artifacts

This volume examines how power was framed in Visigothic society and how a diverse population with a complex and often conflicting cultural inheritance was thereby held together as a single kingdom. Indeed, through this dynamic process a new, early medieval society emerged. Understanding this transformation is no simple matter, as it involved the deployment of an array of political and cultural resources: the production of knowledge, the appropriation of Patristic literature, controlling and administering rural populations, reconceptualizing the sacred, capital punishment and exile, controlling the manufacture of currency, and defining Visigothic society in relation to other polities such as the neighbouring Byzantine state. In order to achieve an analysis of these different phenomena, this volume brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines. This interdisciplinary approach therefore expands the available sources and reformulates topics of traditional scholarship in order to engage with a renewal of Visigothic Studies and reformulate the paradigm of study itself. As a result, this volume rethinks frameworks of power in the Peninsula along not only historical and archaeological but also anthropological terms, presenting the reader with a new understanding of Iberian society as a whole.

Eleonora Dell’ Elicine is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at Universidad de General Sarmiento (Argentina) since 2011. Her research field is the political, intellectual, and social history of Europe in the Early Middle Ages, with particular interest in the Visigothic Kingdom in the seventh century. She focuses on the semiotic ways in which the Visigothic Church managed to communicate authority - specially liturgy, chronicles, and miracles. Since 2014, she has been working on the problem of superstition and idolatrous practices.
Céline Martin is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne (France) and a member of Ausonius (UMR 5607, CNRS). She holds a PhD in Medieval History (2000) from the EHESS (Paris). Prior to arriving at Bordeaux, she was Senior Lecturer at the University of Lille-3 (2001-2007). As a specialist in 6-7th century Spain, her research deals mostly with political theory and practice, and particularly focuses on the normative corpus of Visigothic leges and concilia.