The Ghost of Saint Desiderius

THE GHOST OF SAINT DESIDERIUS Andrew Fear University of Keele Perhaps the most striking thing about the life of the Visigothic King Sisebut (ruled 612-621) was his decision to write a Life ofSt. Desiderius of Vienne.1 It is not so much the act of writing itself which is curious. The King was an aspirant intellectual, as can be seen by his friendship with Isidore ofSeville who referred to his monarch, albeit perhaps backhandedly , as "seientia litterarum magna ex parte imbutus" (LasHistorias de losgodos 60) . He was also a highly devout man as the naming of his ill-fated son Reccared shows. His zeal led him to order the forceful conversion ofallJews in his realm to Christianity, a policy denounced as overzealous by Isidore of Seville (Las historias de los godos 60) , and abandoned after his death. His poem De Eclipsi Lunae may have been intended in part to clear away pagan superstition about celestial phenomena which had been exacerbated in Spain after eclipses in 611 and 612, and one of his letters to Isidore is highly supportive of the decision ofhis illegitimate son, Theudila, to enter the cloister, which is byno means a normal reaction for the time.2 Later Spaniards also noted his piety; Canon 56 of the Fourth Council of Toledo convened in 633 soon after the King's death refers to him as a religiosissimusprinceps. While these incidents could individually be explained away as acts ofpolitics masked by religion, their combination should suggest that we ought to agree with José Orlandis that "[l]a religiosidad personal de Sisebuto fue sincera y profunda" (128) and call into question neither Sisebut's personal initiative nor his integrity in writing hagiography. 1 (= VSD) , editions inJ.-P.Migne and byJuan Gil (1974, 1991), translation in Andrew Fear (1997). 2 Sisebut Epistola 7(editions in Migne and byJacques Fontaine in Isidore de Seville, Traité delà nature...) ; a cynic might contend that this pious practice would have resolved some problems of royal succession. La corónica 29.2 (Spring, 2001): 79-93 80AndrewFearLa corónica 29..2, 2001 Ifthe motive for writing poses no problem, the work itselfdoes. Both its style and Latinity are poor. The Vita is written in highly contorted Latin which while high on rhetoric is low on content (José C. Martín), and whose syntax not infrequendy breaks down all together. This is a striking contrast to Sisebut's other works which show, especially his poetry , a fair degree of competence in Latin and has led to some scholars to question whether Sisebut was in fact the author of the Vita at all (BaldomeroJiménez Duque 109). It would however seem odd to posit a ghost writer for the king as he would have had more compentent secretaries at hand. We should rather see this work as an act of personal piety and assume that his official correspondence would have been handled by a Chancery scribe. Quite apart from the Life 's linguistic weaknesses, there is a second problem: Sisebut's chosen subject. Desiderius, the 28th bishop ofVienne, had been executed within living memory (607) by the Frankish monarchs Brunhilda and Theuderic II of Burgundy (ruled 596-613) with whom he had a protracted quarrel provoked by his unwillingness to bless Theuderic's illegitimate sons.3 He had only a minor cult in Gaul and none whatsoever within Spain: a glance at the festivals celebrated by the Visigothic Church will show that there were no prayers said for Desiderius, and his day, the 23rd May, was not kept.4 This cannot have been because Visigothic Spain was hostile to the veneration of foreign saints. Venerable figures such as St. Adrian of Nicomedia and St. Babilas of Antioch were honoured, even saints coming from the lands of the hated Franks had their place in Visigothic worship - the most obvious example being St. Martin ofTours (Carmen García Rodriguez) . Why Sisebut should pick on such an obscure individual, and especially one about whom he apparendy knew litde, as the subject of a hagiography when more obvious Spanish saints were in the field remains mysterious. A prime Iberian candidate , for example, would surely have been St. Leocadia, martyred at the...