Nouvelles chartes visigothiques du monastère pyrénéen d'Asán

The Visigothic kingdom of Toledo (6th and 7th centuries) is known primarily through the existence of a body of narrative and normative sources. Visigothic charters are almost totally lacking, and until very recently the complete texts of only two of them were known. Therefore, the recent discovery and publication of an additional four charters, all connected, like the other two, to the Pyrenaean monastery of San Martin de Asán has shed new light on aspects of the 6th century in the Iberian Peninsula.

This book offers the first collective discussion of this corpus of six charters, by archaeologists, historians, and philologists. The various contributions examine the monastery in its territorial context across the centuries, and its economic underpinning through the exploitation of estates in valleys, piedmont, and highlands. Also included are explorations of monastic life in the Pyrenees, one of the earliest evidence for it in the Iberian Peninsula, and consideration of its connections to early Gallic and Italian monasticism. Asán also appears to be the source of the earliest evidence for the use of charters of donation, a traditional documentary bedrock for medieval studies. The contributions stress the social role of mediation played by the monastery and its connections to the Visigothic Arian monarchy, forged through the manipulation of the tax system and the appointment of bishops trained in Asán. The monastery’s connections to royal power were also the result of its crossroads situation in a context of ongoing conflicts between post-Roman policies. Finally, this corpus encourages to revisit some later texts relating to Asán: together with the hagiographic dossiers of Victorianus of Asán and of Gaudiosus of Tarazona, new critical editions of several of them are included in this book.

Still little known by scholars of the period, let alone by a wider readership, the Asán charter corpus provides much new evidence and insight to improve our understanding of southern European societies in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West.