History Faculty Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-25-2023
Abstract
In the late ninth century, a series of chronicles from the Christian kingdom of Asturias staked a claim on Visigothic identity, and thus ancestral legitimacy to rule in Iberia, for Asturias and its kings. Connecting Pelayo, the first king of the Asturian kingdom, to the last Visigothic kings and crafting his image as an ideal Goth and Christian was essential to this process. Informed by scholarship on “borderlands” and boundary-making, this article demonstrates how the chroniclers renegotiated the parameters of Gothic identity to impose the idea of a strict border between legitimate and illegitimate, good Catholic and heretic, and loyalty and disloyalty. In doing so, they provided Pelayo with a layered and flexible Gothic-Christian-Asturian identity.
Recommended Citation
Erica Buchberger (2023) Crafting the image of Pelayo: identity and state-building in early medieval Asturian chronicles, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 15:3, 405-426, https://doi.org/10.1080/17546559.2023.2236598
Publication Title
Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies
DOI
10.1080/17546559.2023.2236598
Comments
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies on July 25, 2023, available at https://doi.org/10.1080/17546559.2023.2236598
View published version freely: https://www.tandfonline.com/share/MKAUKUZMTQDJIUCJTVEI?target=10.1080/17546559.2023.2236598