Abstract
After the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, Christian communities migrated from southern Iberia to the northern terrain of the Pyrenees and Cantabrian Mountains. This movement led to the development of Christian centres and practices throughout this region, which are evidenced in the monastic sites founded throughout the North. By calling on relevant textual and visual material from medieval Iberian sources and from the most popular medieval Iberian manuscript tradition, Beatus of Liébana’s Commentary on the Apocalypse, this chapter argues that these monastic groups contextualized their experiences in terms of historical and biblical tales of struggle and triumph in the mountains.
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Notes
- 1.
In the Morgan Beatus, there are 12 interrupted pages of text between the world map and the preceding image of the Commission to Write, which is vertical and single page. The Valladolid Beatus features 32 text pages between the map and the same preceding image, while the Girona Beatus has 35 pages between those two images.
- 2.
The Beatus text references the map image, explaining: ‘This is the Church extending throughout the whole earthly globe. This is the holy and elect seed, the regal priesthood, that was sown over the whole world. They were few, but select. The picture appended to the text more clearly illustrates the grains sown in the field of this world, that the prophets prepared and sowed there’ (Beatus 2000, 406). This explicit mention of the map suggests the importance of the image from the beginnings of the Beatus tradition.
- 3.
For more on Cartosemiotics and the study of cartographic languages, see Jānis Štrauhmanis, ‘Thematic Cartography and Cartosemiotics: Common and Distinctive Features’, Scientific Journal of RCU, 8 (2012): pp. 25–29; Alexander Kent and Peter Vujakovic, ‘Cartographic Language: Towards a New Paradigm for Understanding Topographic Maps’, Cartographic Journal 48/1 (2011): pp. 21–40; and Arthur Wolodtschenko, ‘Cartography and Cartosemiotics: Conception Vision’, Journal of the Japan Cartographers Associations 43/2 (2005): pp. 17–19.
- 4.
Both Augustine and Cassiodorus were read widely in medieval Iberia. This is evidenced in the library inventories from Oviedo, Burgo de Osma, Oña, Ripoll and Burgos, as well as by extant illustrated manuscripts such as Cassiodorus’ Commentary on the Psalms, Madrid, R.A.H., 8, which was produced in the tenth century.
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Goetsch, E. (2018). Reading Mountains: Performative Visual Language in Tenth-Century Northern Iberian Monastic Communities. In: Kakalis, C., Goetsch, E. (eds) Mountains, Mobilities and Movement. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_4
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