The Politics of Identity in Visigothic Spain: Religion and Power in the Histories of Isidore of Seville by Jamie Wood (review)

The florid title of this book conceals more than it reveals of its author’s purposes, which involve the comparison of all the writings of Isidore that have any bearing on history. These consist primarily of short historical narratives of different kinds, but also include considerations of the nature and purpose of history in such seemingly nonhistorical texts as the Etymologiae. Such an approach, embracing the full range of these texts, is revealing, especially of reasons for the marked differences between the two versions of both St. Isidore of Seville’s Chronicle and his histories of the Goths, Vandals, and Sueves. The explanations given for such variations depend upon an a priori view of Isidore as both principal ideologue and spokesman for the Gothic monarchy, and as the dominant figure in the Spanish church of his day. Although such an interpretation of his political role and of his purposes in his historical writings is long established, it requires more challenge than it encounters here.

Academics subscribe too easily to the assumption that those who have left us writings were more influential in their lifetimes than those that have not. This is certainly not justified in the case of Isidore. Could he from Seville have exerted more influence on the successive royal courts in Toledo than the bishops of that city, who included Heladius (615–33), a former provincial governor and vir illustrissimus aulae regiae? Isidore himself appears in this book largely in intellectual isolation, devising historical narratives aimed mainly at pleasing his royal “patrons.” No attention is given to the powerful African influence on his thinking and on the Spanish church of his time, and the author is not well versed in theological issues, not least the Three Chapters Controversy. Isidore’s judgments on former kings based on their treatment of ”the poor” are taken literally, although in reality this can only have reflected their donations to the Church. Direct contact between monarchs and “the poor,” however defined, were exceedingly rare in any period. Similarly, we are told that, in his aim of elevating the new Gothic order, all Romans were apparently branded as heretics by Isidore because of the theological views of a handful of emperors, although the wider context of the nature and evolution of Roman, Gothic (not Visigothic), and Hispanic identities in the post-imperial kingdoms of Spain is left unexplored.

Despite such omissions and debatable interpretations, there are many highly commendable features of the book, including its conception. There also is a good discussion of the differences between the views of Ss. Isidore and Augustine on the Six Ages of the World, and of the idea and practice of brevitas in Isidore’s historical work. Particularly interesting is the revelation of his increased emphasis on the virtues of joint rule in the second versions of his Chronicle and Historia Gothorum, both dating to the mid-620s, when Suinthila had associated his young son Riccimir as notional co-ruler.

Stylistically the book can suffer from its origin as a thesis, laboring under an excess of signposting. Each of its four main chapters is introduced by up to three pages of description of its intended content and ends with a similar section repeating the conclusions reached. A final ten pages effectively repeats all of these individual sets of conclusions, leaving the reader exhausted by this authorial nannying. Additionally, Jamie Wood is over-addicted to anachronistic metaphors, as in “the episcopal juggernaut had a wide turning circle” and “an ideology which had been in a research and development phase” (pp. 134–35). It is to be hoped that he will take his work on Isidore further and fill out some of the areas not fully or entirely convincingly explored here.