Overview
Damián Fernández is an Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. He received his BA in History from the University of Buenos Aires and pursued his graduate studies at the University of British Columbia (MA in Religious Studies) and Princeton University (PhD in History). Damián Fernández’s previous research focused on the social history of the Iberian Peninsula during Late Antiquity. His book, Aristocrats and Statehood in Western Iberia, 300-600 C.E. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), examines the relationship between socio-economic elites and state authority during the transition between the Roman Empire and the so-called barbarian kingdoms. His next book will trace the history of ideas on rebellion in the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo, the polity that succeeded the Roman Empire in the Iberian Peninsula before the Muslim conquest of 711. By analyzing the literature on rebellion, the book will argue that ideas on rebel-hood contributed to defining post-Roman government around the notion of “order” (political, military, and cosmic). Damián Fernández is also working on a translation and commentary of the Liber Iudiciodum or Visigothic Code, a seventh-century compilation of laws issued by Visigothic kings.
Research Focus
My research project will take a new approach to the study of late antique political authority and will result in my second book, tentatively titled Rebellion and Political Authority in the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo (507-711 CE): Tyrants, Invaders, Sinners, and the Quest for Order. I propose to reassess how historians and modern political theorists approach the question of government during the transition between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, with a specific focus on the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo. In this post-imperial, “barbarian” kingdom, there is a relative wealth of sources on rebels, largely due to the inability of ruling kings to secure a stable succession. The dominant narrative in the field centers on the Christianization of political discourse and ideas of rulership. By refocusing on the ruler’s antithetical figure, the rebel, I will nuance the paradigm of straightforward Christianization. Instead, I will argue that order (understood broadly to include political, military, social, and cosmic dimensions) informed ideals of late antique kingship. Order-granting is neither a typically classical nor a Christian conception of authority, but an aspiration rooted in the realities of the late antique context, between the rather autocratic late-Roman emperorship and the emerging post-imperial kingship.