Why seventh-century Spain was a book production hotspot

The Spanish seventh century nobody expected

According to the manuscript count used by one participant in the debate, Spain has only surpassed the European average for book production at two moments in its history. The first, and the most unexpected, was the seventh century, in the final years of the Visigothic kingdom. The figure clashes head-on with the image of a territory about to be swallowed up by the Arab invasion of 711.

The most repeated explanation has three legs. The first is relative stability: while Italy was bleeding out in the Gothic War and the Lombard invasions, and Merovingian Gaul was fragmented, Visigothic Hispania enjoyed, from the late sixth century onward, a fairly unified kingdom with its capital in Toledo. Reccared's conversion to Catholicism at the Third Council of Toledo in 589 closed the religious gap between Goths and Hispano-Romans and cemented the alliance between both elites.

A network of bishoprics with their own libraries

The second leg is institutional. Seville, Toledo, Zaragoza and Mérida functioned as learned episcopal sees where bishops were both the intellectual and administrative elite, with libraries and schools. That is where Isidore of Seville and his Etymologiae came from, the most influential encyclopedia of the early medieval Latin West. The third leg, more contested, points to the arrival of people and knowledge fleeing other conflicts, along with a living link to Constantinople that brought commercial and cultural muscle.

Some add a fourth, less epic factor: the very nature of the Gothic people, not much inclined to raze Roman structures, allowed Latin ways and customs to survive and develop rather than be replaced.

The problem of counting books that no longer exist

Here begins the awkward part. The book production figures do not come from a contemporary register, but from reconstructing how many manuscripts were written based on those that survive today. For the period before 800, the reference is the Codices Latini Antiquiores, the catalogue that palaeographer Elias Avery Lowe built between 1934 and 1971 by examining codex after codex in libraries across Europe, Spain included.

On that basis, estimated loss rates are applied to approximate the original output. The method has defenders and it has holes. The most cited one: preservation bias. A catalogue compiled from Oxford or Princeton can overrepresent what was kept in the Anglo-Saxon sphere and leave in the shadows what was lost in the south. And the study is limited to the Latin West: Byzantium and Greek, Arabic and Hebrew manuscripts are left out, which invalidates any comparison with the eastern Mediterranean.

Can the seventh century be compared with the nineteenth?

For the nineteenth century things are different. The number of books and newspapers published in Spain or the United States can be reconstructed fairly reliably because the surviving texts themselves include that data. For the seventh century there is no bibliographic index or anything like it. All there is are indirect references: donations to monasteries, the founding of libraries, inheritances that list books. From there to a pan-European comparative table is a stretch.

Even so, the historiographical consensus on the so-called Isidorian Renaissance holds: there was a moment of Visigothic cultural splendour, with a literate elite concentrated in the episcopal sees and an intellectual output that travelled across Europe for centuries. Whether that splendour was above the European average is what the arithmetic disputes.

The prediction, with reservations: the seventh century will keep being cited as the Visigothic golden age in textbooks, but increasingly as a qualitative phenomenon —Isidore carries a lot of weight— rather than as a quantitative victory in a count of codices whose total we will never know.