Vitas Patrum Emeritensium
The Vitas Patrum Emeritensium is an early Medieval Latin hagiographical work written by an otherwise unknown Paul the Deacon of Mérida. The work narrates the lives of the five bishops who held the see of Mérida in the second half of the 6th-century and the first half of the 7th-century, which were Paul, Fidelis, Masona, Innocentius and Renovatius, with particular space being given to the life of Masona.[1]
The date of composition is debated, but is generally thought to have been made in the 7th-century, even if scholars such as Francis Clark that it could be as late as the 9th-century. But this regards the bulk of the text and not the preface and the first three chapters that were added much later. First printed in 1633 in Madrid, only half a dozen manuscripts survive plus some fragments.[1]