ABSTRACT
This chapter examines sixth- and seventh-century epigraphic representations of church founders in Visigothic Iberia. It considers the inscriptions in terms of their contents and, where possible, their materiality and context, in order to identify the social actors responsible for the creation of Christian sacred spaces as well as the social dynamics and patterns reflected by the inscriptions. While past research often assumed that the majority of Visigothic church foundation took place through episcopal initiative, based in large part on late antique hagiographic texts, recent scholarship has re-examined the evidence and concluded that other parties played significant roles in the ‘Christianisation’ of Iberia’s late antique topography. The analysis conducted in this chapter confirms this shift in scholarly opinion: lay aristocrats, Visigothic monarchs, clerics, and bishops, all appear in these inscriptions and in a dedicatory and funerary fashion. Furthermore, it is clear that Iberian church foundation was often a collaborative undertaking. We see that bishops played an important role in church foundations by performing the last, ceremonial step of transforming church buildings into sacred spaces; at the same time, we see that others’ contributions were equally necessary parts of the process.
