Visions of Unity after the Visigoths: Early Iberian Latin Chronicles and the Mediterranean World by Ksenia Bonch Reeves (review)

With a beautiful cover portraying an image of a council of Visigothic bishops from the Codex Aemilianesis, Visions of Unity after the Visigoths takes the reader into a historiographical study of post-Visigothic Latin chronicles in the Iberian Peninsula. The book presents a very extensive introduction where the context of the texts under scrutiny is outlined, analyzing key concepts regarding the literary genre of these texts -which should be considered "chronicles" and not any kind of historiographical writing- and defining important terms related to the provenance and authorship of the chronicles, such as "Mozarabic" or "Neo- gothic". Additionally, the introduction discusses at length the fact that early 20^th- century Spanish historians did not pay much attention to early Latin chronicles in the process of formulating the concept of Spain as a "nation", another term which is profusely analyzed in the introduction.

One of the book's main concerns is "the problematic nature of regarding medieval Iberian society from the perspective of a modern-day political entity called Spain", especially in relation to the chronicles composed in the mid-8^th and late 9^th century (2). Consequently, Bonch Reeves has searched for patterns in the narrative structure and style of these chronicles to identify specific ways in which earlier Peninsular medieval chronicles were used in later historical compilations, thus creating "a Castile-centric ideology of peninsular unity" (3). For example, using the information derived from these chronicles, the author argues that, as a reaction to the Arab invasion of the peninsula in 711, Christian writers anchored their roots in their Visigothic inheritance, advising against the notion that "these ideological constructs developed in culturally isolated Christian enclaves" (10). As the author herself recognizes, this methodology has some limitations, as the change of language (from Latin to vernacular) in subsequent historiographical compilations, especially after the 13^th century, added several layers of complexity, this being the main reason why the chronicles analyzed in this monograph were all composed in Latin.

The general organization of the book consists of an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. The first two parts of the book are divided into sub-chapters, as each of the six chapters tackle different aspects of a specific medieval Latin chronicle. The first chapter, "The Epic's Poor Cousins: Medieval Iberian Latin Chronicles in Twentieth-Century Philology", takes a look at the reasons why Latin chronicles were not given enough credit by 20^th-century Spanish historians and philologists. According to Bonch Reeves, one of the reasons was that, for many Spanish philologists, epic poems portrayed a much more cohesive and original history of Spain. Taking a comparative approach, the author analyzes historical events from the beginning of the 20^th century that, in her opinion, limited the study of Latin texts, namely the philological approach of critics such as Ramón Menéndez Pidal and José Antonio Maravall, and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco from 1939 to 1975. Thus, in the formulation of a modern concept of nation, Latin was considered a language that did not portray the idea of "uniqueness" as well as the Romance vernacular did.

The second chapter, "The Mozarabic Chronicles, Islam, and the Mediterranean Apocalyptic", focuses on two short Mozarabic chronicle texts, the Chronicle of 741 and the Chronica Muzarabica composed around 754, to prove that their "chronological layout, narrative organization, and choice of tropes partake in the Mediterranean apocalyptic movement" (73). Similarly, the third chapter, "Between the Emirate and the Holy Land: Eulogius of Córdoba, the Culture of Martyrdom, and the Ideology of Iberian Cohesion" discusses three of the texts written by Eulogius of Córdoba that narrate the well-known story of the 9^th- century Córdoba martyrs, a group of approximately fifty Christians that got themselves executed by openly challenging Islamic doctrine.

In the fourth chapter, "Visigothic Law, Sovereignty...