RT Article
T1 Clarifying the Eclipse: Ascetics, Politics, and the Poetics of Power in Post-Roman Iberia
JF Vigiliae Christianae
VO 73
IS 5
SP 531
OP 563
A1 Ungvary, David
LA English
YR 2019
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1685447228
AB  This essay examines a literary exchange between the Visigothic poet-king Sisebut (612-621 AD) and his scholar-bishop Isidore of Seville following an anomalous sequence of eclipses. After Sisebut commissioned a scientific treatise from Isidore on such natural phenomena, he responded to the bishop's prose with a short poem on lunar eclipses (De eclipsi lunae). This study interprets the exchange of texts not as a literary game, but as high-stakes political correspondence. It situates the king's verses in an ongoing process of cultural construction in Visigothic Spain, led prominently by Isidore himself, but also tied to a rising ascetic movement. It argues that Sisebut was attuned to Isidore's designs to manage the discourses through which Christian power was proclaimed, and shows how the king attempted to versify in accord with scientific truth so as to fit within Isidore's ascetic intellectual program.
K1 Isidore of Seville
K1 Latin poetry
K1 Sisebut
K1 Visigothic Kingdom
K1 Asceticism
K1 early medieval politics
DO 10.1163/15700720-12341411