Longstanding aficionados of my oeuvre both of you will know that the early medieval Iberian Peninsula has long been close to my heart. I cut my teeth as a scholar on the frontier ground between al-Andalus and the Franks, so it was with great pleasure that I returned to that terrain in my latest publication. It can be found Open Access online here. The observant among you will notice that it is a very special issue because although the calendar may suggest that it came out in , it is dated to Fortunately, historians are rarely troubled by such chronological trifles.
Some of the papers first saw the light of day at workshops held in , including mine at one in Oxford that October. Within that brief there was a huge variety, showcasing the wealth hidden in these terse additions. They are wonderful and I would encourage you to read them all. Among the papers it was my pleasure to edit are essays considering minitexts on music, philosophy, and magic. Other writers chose to use minitexts to shed light on places known to be centres of learning and power, but where other types of evidence were scarce, including Vercelli, Sens and Lyon.
This included Septimania north of the Pyrenees, and modern Catalonia. Prior to , the northeast primarily featured when it was attacked by the Merovingians or in rebellion against the Visigothic king. This was a tough neighbourhood before an army of Arabs and Berbers rocked up and complicated an already exciting mix of Franks, Goths and Basques.
Autun S may seem an unlikely place to look for clues to fill in some of the blanks here. Quite how it ended up in Autun is unclear as it is first recorded there in Crucially, we can locate it fairly precisely to the area around Urgell in the early eighth century from a minitext in the manuscript which indicates that it was given to Bishop Nambadus of Urgell. The manuscript is filled with Visigothic minitexts. Even more impressive than their number are their variety.
We have pen trials from didactic texts, bits of legal formulae, extracts from a computus manual, and a lot of poetry, some of it very niche. This suggests that an awful lot was going on in this apparently marginal area. The overall effect is to suggest that the northeastern Visigothic frontier had its fair share of educational centres and was very much connected to wider intellectual trends.
