Men of Letters and Men of Good Works in Early Medieval Iberia

The texts known as De viris illustribus (‘On distinguished men’) are not only a series of Christian Latin biographies and bibliographies, but an argument through bio-bibliography for canonising what that literary tradition is or should be. The genre begins with Jerome, who composed its first instalment in 392/3 to counter the pagan claim that there were no Christian writers worthy of the name. His compass was purposely universal, embracing both Greek and Latin, and underdetermined, in that his Christian writer was simply a scriptor ecclesiasticus, anyone (even Jews and heretics) who wrote on the Bible or matters of the Church. Given this generous remit, the long legacy of catalogues compiled after Jerome, starting with Gennadius of Marseille picking up where he had left off in the late fifth century, vary widely in form and focus, as collections of distinguished men down to the end of the Middle Ages variously cast a global, local, or institutional net, adopt a more biographical or bibliographical approach. In that complex tradition, Iberia occupies a special place: after Gennadius, it is the source for all but three De viris illustribus texts before the twelfth century. Here, in the Visigothic kingdom of the seventh, the genre began to be transformed in the hands of Isidore of Seville and his continuators, concentrating on the literary heritage of the Peninsula while taking on elements of hagiography and historiography, adopting a more provincial, even civic scope, and finally concerning itself with promoting one episcopal see alone. The turning point in this evolution came with Ildefonsus of Toledo, who drew on the works of Gregory the Great and the Roman Book of Pontiffs to redirect his catalogue towards an almost total focus on episcopal authority and personal sanctity. In his curious composite of worldly and otherworldly, biographical and hagiographical, he redefined the nature and purpose of the genre. Or did he?