Text and Context: Patronage in Late Antique Mérida

This study brings together a set of primary sources for the period of transition from late Roman to post-Roman rule over central Hispania, from the city of Mérida (Augusta Emerita) in west-central Spain. These sources—all inscriptions—illustrate important changes and continuities in the power dynamics at work in one of the most important urban centers of late antique Iberia in the period of Visigothic expansion. The central piece of evidence is the so-called Bridge Inscription of Mérida, which is preserved only in a ninth-century manuscript. A new critical reading of this complex text paves the way for a reconstruction of the local and regional context in which the events documented on the inscription took place.