Sociability and Sense of Belonging : Community Interaction in the Work of Valerius of Bierzo

Resumen

The work of Valerius of Bierzo (c. 630 – c. 695) – along with other documents that can give an account of immediate realities, such as the Vita Fructuosi, the monastic rules of the Fructuosan environment, the minutes of Third Council of Braga (675), or the news of other councils that, although assembled in Toledo, could have approached the problems of Gallaecia − offers a picture of a profoundly complex social reality; a society of horizontal and vertical relationships, a world of rigid hierarchies but likewise a world of occasional and more or less reified coexistences that can provide a glimpse of a certain sense of sociability.The sources under examination have some elements in common, such as a coherent geographical space and a chronological range that spans only two generations; therefore, the understanding of phenomena is not distorted by temporal discordances and dissimilar contextualizations. These sources present a society which is predominantly peasant, but that revolves around nuclei of power − cities, monasteries, episcopal sees, large estates, etc. – by which survival strategies have been designed. In this sense, the texts present a reality that seems to be overlapping a world of legal or doctrinal impositions, a society of undoubted dynamism which probably generates its own identification links, its own sense of group belonging. However, these networks are not always easy to identify, and there is no doubt that collective group sentiment can be distorted by representations of prestige.