Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Dedication
- Abbreviations
- Note on Translation
- Introduction Thinking about Abortion in the Early Middle Ages
- 1 From Hope of Children to Object of God's Care: Abortion in Classical and Late Antique Society
- 2 The Word of God: Abortion and Christian Communities in Sixth-Century Gaul
- 3 Church and State: Politicizing Abortion in Visigothic Spain
- 4 Medicine for Sin: Reading Abortion in Early Medieval Penitentials
- 5 Tradition in Practice: Abortion under the Carolingians
- 6 Legislative Energies: Disputing Abortion in Law-Codes
- 7 Interior Wound: The Rumour of Abortion in the Divorce of Lothar II and Theutberga
- 8 Unnatural Symbol: Imagining Abortivi in the Early Middle Ages
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Church and State: Politicizing Abortion in Visigothic Spain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Dedication
- Abbreviations
- Note on Translation
- Introduction Thinking about Abortion in the Early Middle Ages
- 1 From Hope of Children to Object of God's Care: Abortion in Classical and Late Antique Society
- 2 The Word of God: Abortion and Christian Communities in Sixth-Century Gaul
- 3 Church and State: Politicizing Abortion in Visigothic Spain
- 4 Medicine for Sin: Reading Abortion in Early Medieval Penitentials
- 5 Tradition in Practice: Abortion under the Carolingians
- 6 Legislative Energies: Disputing Abortion in Law-Codes
- 7 Interior Wound: The Rumour of Abortion in the Divorce of Lothar II and Theutberga
- 8 Unnatural Symbol: Imagining Abortivi in the Early Middle Ages
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In a letter apparently written in the late sixth century a certain Tarra asked for the Visigothic king's help in a difficult matter. All that we know about Tarra comes from this letter. He had been a monk at the monastery of Cauliana, near Mérida, but he now found himself expelled after rumours spread that he had visited a prostitute. Tarra protested his innocence. He did not know a single prostitute in Mérida or the surrounding province. A widower turned monk, no woman had touched his lips since the death of his wife. Tarra maintained that he had been banished without a fair hearing. Tarra's Germanic name and, more importantly, his conspicuous emphasis on orthodox credentials – at one point, he swore an oath in the name of the three members of the Trinity – suggest that he might have been an Arian Goth who had recently entered the Catholic fold just as Reccared, the king he was writing to, had done. If so, Tarra's letter conveys not only the disruption that rumours of sexual misconduct could wreak upon religious communities but also tensions lurking beneath the ‘ideological screen’ of ‘social unanimity’ in Visigothic society after the formalization of Reccared's conversion at the third council of Toledo in 589.
Tarra's Latin has its quirks. He described his expulsion in a striking way. Defamed and wrongly accused, he complained, ‘they have flung me out like an uncondemned abortion from the womb and all the earth above me mourned; no one could be found who would know me well’. The last two clauses can be found in Mozarabic liturgy for Palm Sunday. The initial image, however, was Tarra's own. Effectively, he likened his fellow monks to abortionists who had expelled him from the womb of the monastery. This was more than just an idiosyncratic image within an idiosyncratic letter. Tarra's image provides a glimpse of the complex cultural significance of abortion in the Early Middle Ages. Metaphors of abortion, often wielded in polemical contexts, have their own history, to which we turn in the final chapter. More immediately, there was a cultural background in Visigothic Spain against which it made sense to use abortion imagery in a petition to the king.
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- Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c.500–900 , pp. 93 - 125Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015