The Word as Lived: The Practice of Orthodoxy in Early Medieval Iberia, c.500-711

Abstract

The Word as Lived: The Practice of Orthodoxy in Early Medieval Iberia, c.500-711, investigates the post-Roman transformation of western Christianity by examining debates over correct religious practice in the early medieval Iberian peninsula. Beginning with the establishment of the Iberian Visigothic kingdom in the early 500s, and continuing through its dissolution in the face of Arab conquest in 711, it explores how Iberian Christians struggled to actualize their belief through a broad spectrum of activities ranging from liturgical rituals to everyday moral living. It reveals that in early medieval societies, orthodoxy was not only an abstract theological and ideological ideal, but was also an ongoing process rooted in concrete situations and acts. By placing religious practice and its contestation at the center of analysis, this dissertation provides a new perspective on the histories of the Visigothic and Suevic kingdoms and on historical constructions of Christian orthodoxy. In modern studies of ancient and medieval Christian heresy, religious practice is often conceptualized solely as either a marker of difference or as the subject of heretical accusations. This dissertation reconceives early medieval religious practice as a dynamic part of being an orthodox individual and emphasizes the importance of Christian ritual as a process of self-formation as well as a symbolic discourse. The dissertation also provides a new vantage point on the slow, yet steady transformation of ancient Christianity into medieval Christianity. By studying changes in religious practices and in the social imagination of those practices, it traces evolving notions of how Christians perceived their world, the divine, and orthodoxy itself in a (supposedly) entirely Christian world.