The Significance of Social Unanimity in a Visigothic Hagiography: Keys to an Ideological Screen

The hagiographical texts of Visigothic Spain (c. 507-711) provide exciting material for the study of post-Roman Hispania in the general context of the late antique West. However, it is important to reflect on the nature of these works. Why were they written? What were their principal aims? The author works here on one concrete aspect common to the hagiographical Visigothic landscape: the idea of a general atmosphere of consensus projected by the entities from which the texts emerged. This article is centered on one of these sources, the Lives of the holy men of Mérida, a city that had been the administrative capital of Late Roman Hispania. This essay presents several hypotheses about the historical phenomenon of a cultural model of control, all inside the complex world of transformations occurring in an important space of post-Roman Europe.