La legislación civil y eclesiástica concerniente a las supersticiones y a las pervivencias idolátricas en la Hispania de los siglos VI-VII

Abstract

Civil and canonical Hispanic legislation in VI and VII centuries provides us with multiple examples about the persistence of supersticious and idolatrous practices.The Visigothic laws relating to this subject mainly concern the auguries and the employ of magic, both of them considered harmful and hardly punished. Although ecclesiastical canons also regulated the issue of auguries and magic, they devoted almost all their attention to the legacy of paganism (something that we do not observe in civil legislation). The analysis of contemporaneous narrative sources permits us to confirm that it was a real and daily problem. Therefore, the inclusión of these laws in legislative codes did not answer to the simple need to fill a legal void.