José Antonio Jara Fuente. "Introducción: memoria de una identidad (de identidades). Castilla en la Edad Media." 9-15
This book includes eleven contributions originally presented at an international symposium on Memory and Identity in Castile during the Middle Ages, held at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. It gathered scholars from France, Spain, and the United Kingdom that specialize in a variety of fields, including history, archeology, linguistics, law, and literary studies. In his introduction, one of the editors of the volume, José Antonio Jara Fuente (9-15), poses the main questions raised by the different pieces of scholarship: How does the construction of identities interact with the expression of memory in medieval Castile? How do the interactions between identity and memory help us to understand the construction and development of medieval subjects? And, incidentally, what do we mean when we talk about medieval subjects? Each of the contributions responds to these questions from different positions, offering, thus, a constellation of insights in which memory and identity are put in a dialogue with space and territory. I will hereafter describe each contribution.
Francisco Ruiz Gómez. "Identidad en la Edad Media la culpa y la pena." 17-54. This contribution's footnotes reveal a sophisticated background of theoretical readings ranging from Kant to Werner Sombart, and from Weber to Appiah, in search of a concept of identity that, according to Ruiz Gómez, was not a matter of concern for medieval men. For him, any research in medieval identity would be a "contemporary issue that requires from the historian a degree of elaboration going far beyond the literal study of the sources." (17; all translations are mine, original texts are either in Spanish or in French). With this idea in mind, Ruiz Gómez acknowledges that the very word "identity" and its derivatives do not appear in the medieval sources he is studying, primarily Alfonso X's Siete Partidas. The historian, therefore, needs to analyze other notions, concepts, and vocabularies in order to understand what medieval identity is all about. In order to make a statement about identity in the Middle Ages, Ruiz Gómez focuses on religion, law, and philosophy. The first two sections of his paper, almost entirely devoted to the Siete Partidas, analyze a tropological model of identity based on the imitatio Christi, and a legal model of identity based on the definition of the person according to rights and obligations (44). The third section is a broad survey of modern and contemporary ideas about the subject in the first person, from Kant to Appiah, ending with a reflection of the inutility of national identity in a globalized world (53). This paper's main challenge is to be an all-encompassing analysis that offers a general idea of medieval identity without focusing on the experiences of individual subjects. It would have been interesting to follow a lead that he announces but does not explore in-depth: How can we deal with medieval identity by exploring archival registers (20)?
Julio Escalona Monge. "Territorialidad e identidades locales en la Castilla condal." 55-82. Particularly exciting is Escalona Monge's contribution to the volume. First of all, it entails a theoretical approach focusing on scale and scaling, which has not previously been explored in Medieval Studies. This approach is especially fruitful for understanding identity configuration as public performance in both small and large communities ranging from rural villages to the Castilian condal of the 9th and 10th centuries. Such an approach is fundamental for investigating the processes of territorialization, which Monge understands as a spatial expression of collective identity (56). This collective identity is a manifestation of citizenship and its commemorations. In this case, Escalona Monge argues for a documental commemoration of citizenship, which can be explored either directly through extant public records or indirectly through an analysis of space, territory, and landscape. Escalona Monge makes important distinctions between these three notions as different forms of social construction and processes whereby communities occupy and control the space, how they name it, and how they submit it to public businesses. "What is really interesting here," Escalona Monge states, "is not to make a catalogue of how groups make express their territorialization, but rather to consider how local communities insert themselves in other constructions at a bigger scale as a basic element of their own local identity" (67). He thus criticizes the historiographic myth of the isolated local community in the High Middle Ages. In order to analyze this scale (and change of scale) dynamics, Escalona Monge performs original readings of documents coming from chartularies held by some of the most important northern Monasteries of San Pedro de Arlanza, San Pedro de Cardeña, or the chartulary of the Infantado de Covarrubias.
Charles Garcia. "Territorialidad y construcción política de la identidad concejil en la Zamora medieval." 83-103. Charles Garcia starts with a crucial--although perhaps not as axiomatic as he thinks--question: "what degree of importance can we confer to "territory" as a factor for identity, knowing, as we know, that the best definition of identity for medieval individuals was their nature as 'homo christianus'? Or, put in a different way, that what we call 'religion' nowadays, was what determined then the fundamental and holistic structure of the christian West." (83) The question seems to contain a petitio principii, namely that the homo christianus is the fundamental element of the Christian West. This is the general tone of the article, in which the broad generalizations about the Middle Ages--like, for instance, that geometrical division of the territory is contrary to medieval thinking and feeling, which shows a radical dismissal of quite important juridical and political sources from the Late Middle Ages, including, for instance, the Glossa Ordinaria and its distinctions about the concept of dominium (discussed also in the Tercera Partida), or even more clearly the geometrical thinking introduced by jurists like Bartolo da Sassoferrato in his treatises Tyberiades, sive de Fluminibus, to mention only some. From the standpoint of this series of general and debatable assumptions, it is difficult to produce a sound argument about the particular case of Zamora in the Middle Ages. We might simply wonder to which Middle Ages Garcia is referring.
Pascual Martínez Sopena. "Las villas del rey y las fronteras del reino (ca. 1158-1230)." 105-143. Frontier and population are the two keywords of Martínez Sopena's contribution to the volume. He is not interested in broad generalizations, let alone in theory or historiography. Martínez Sopena focuses on a defined, very short period of Castilian and Leonese history (1158-1230) in order to inquire into the political and juridical strategies devised by the kings of the period--and in particular Alfonso VIII of Castile--to build and consolidate monarchical power. Martínez Sopena stresses the essential importance of the kings' development of cities--both newly populated and municipally chartered. The cities, according to Martínez Sopena, helped balance the polarization between monarchy and nobility. To elaborate this argument, Martínez Sopena reads and interprets different agreements leading to the establishment of the limits and rights of lordships, domains, and cities located at the fluid border lines of Castile and León. He reads the treatises of Sahagún in 1158, Medina de Rioseco at the end of the 12th century, the treatises of Cabreros and Toro during the early 13th century, and finally in the fueros or municipal charters and privileges that either created or regulated the King's urban policy. This re-organization of the territory, recalibration of the political balance, and the resulting growth of monarchical power was, according to Martínez Sopena, the source of a new identity within the kingdom during this period.
Georges Martin. "Le concept de 'naturalité' (naturaleza) dans Les Sept Parties d'Alphonse X le Sage." 145-161. This is an outstanding example of the precise and thorough analytical work of Georges Martin. He writes from a very theoretical standpoint as a historian of politics, law, and language. His aim is to understand the political and juridical value of the concept of "naturaleza" or "naturalité," as he translates the Spanish into French, in the plan for Alfonso X's Siete Partidas. "Naturaleza" had been translated by Samuel Parsons Scott as "natural relationships," but this fails to convey the whole series of juridical and political issues raised by Martin. "Naturaleza" is, in fact, a linguistic innovation operating at the levels of both semantics and discourse. Analyzing several laws from the fourth Partida, as well as some other occurrences of the words "natura" and "naturaleza," Martin concludes that the philologists and jurists that wrote the Siete Partidas were able to connect the civil significance of "naturaleza" to "the order of the intangible, universal and permanent of the natural law." Part of the analytical power deployed by Martin consists precisely in not using others' bibliography and focusing explicitly on the Alfonsine texts. However, the article would have benefited from a broader discussion of the double meaning of "nature" in Roman Law, which has been explored by Yann Thomas in "Imago Naturae" and other articles. In my opinion, a concept that has received so much attention from jurists and historians alike should have elicited a broader discussion by Martin. For, as Yann Thomas years ago demonstrated, this slippage between natural law and the institutional fiction of nature is at the core of both Roman law and its commentators and glossators.
Carlos Estepa Díez. "Naturaleza y poder real en Castilla." 163-181. From a completely different point of view, Carlos Estepa Díez delves into the relationship between "naturaleza" and vassalage in connection with the growth of royal power. His approach is radically different from Georges Martin's. This paper explores the extremely interesting agreements in which political and juridical concepts expressing personal and political links were actually put to use. It would be, therefore, extremely fruitful to test the methodological approach and the theoretical conclusions of Martin's paper with an analysis like the one proposed by Estepa Díez. One of the main issues arising Estepa Díez's contribution is how the fluidity of concepts and their political and juridical consequences were mostly related to the fluidity of the border lines between the Iberian kingdoms. Kings and nobles along these borders used the municipalities and other populations as currency for negotiating and establishing their political and juridical relations.
José Manuel Nieto Soria. "Corona e identidad política en Castilla." 183-207. What identity is there in a crown? This could very well be José Manuel Nieto Soria's opening question. In order to answer to this question, he first defines crown itself, using a triple bibliographical reference spanning from Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies in 1957, to García Pelayo's "La Corona. Estudio sobre un símbolo y un concepto político" in 1968, to Tomás y Valiente's "Raíces y paradojas de una conciencia colectiva" in 1994. From these sources spring the concept of a trans-personal, corporative, and symbolic idea of the Crown. For Nieto Soria, the Crown is a political fiction that encompasses many different symbolic, political, and juridical operations within the kingdom. It is upheld by the institutions of power, which the King himself heads. Nieto Soria suggests a fourfold typology of the Castilian Crown in relation to identity: as a corporative unity, as the titular of patrimony, as the titular of political rights, and as collective political memory. Basing his research on court ledgers produced in Castile between the 14th and 15th centuries, Nieto Soria accordingly divides his paper in four parts to describe these four concepts. He stresses the evolutionary character of the Castilian monarchy, arguing that only beginning in the mid-14th century, "the crown becomes a significant political concept" in the four aforementioned senses. To make such a claim, Nieto Soria had to presuppose some kind of superstructural standpoint. He considered the social and political organizations in Castile from above, as it were, instead of trying to make sense of how political concepts were actually used and, therefore, devoid of any possible typology. By the same token, there is a teleological idea about the evolution of monarchy that leads directly from the absence of a universalized political concept throughout the kingdom to a kingdom in which the subjects have become aware that such a political concept not only worked, but worked precisely according to Nieto Soria's fourfold political machinery.
Aengus Ward. "Sancho el Mayor, la reina calumniada y los orígenes del reino de Castilla." 209-224. Aengus Ward analyzes fourteen narratives about the changes taking place during the first half of the 11th century in order to explore the political identities of Castile in that period. Ward considers political identity to be a "dynamic process" whereby the politically dominant groups find legitimation and authorization in their fight for power. For Ward, power is not only control of social resources but also, and above all, symbolic capital. Although most of Ward's sociological notions derive from Bourdieu, the latter is neither mentioned nor discussed in the article. Insofar as adjusting contemporary sociological concepts to distant historical narratives is, at the very least, not self-explanatory, it would have been especially apt to include Bourdieu. Moreover, the narratives regarding the foundation of the kingdom of Castile are removed from the events themselves by more than a century, a fact that suggests the following assertion: "we can observe in late medieval historiography a symbolic battlefield in which political identity tensions find their solution in the construction of a far removed past" (the translation is mine, but I am not sure about the content of the original: "podemos observar en la historiografía tardo-medieval un campo de batalla simbólico en el cual las tensiones de identidad política se resuelven en la construcción de un pasado ya no cercano" (213). The texts examined by Ward focus on episodes that he rightly considers on a "textual borderline" (212, 223) of Castilian historiography: the moment when Fernando I becomes, in the historical accounts, the first king of Castile, despite the fact that his brother Garcia, the firstborn, is still alive. Closely following previous research by Georges Martin, Ward demonstrates how late medieval narratives about this historical event, were, in fact, a means to discuss the negotiations for power between the monarchy and the high nobility and an attempt to create new political identities for each one.
Hélne Sirantoine. "Memoria construida, memoria destruida: la identidad monárquica a través del recuerdo de los emperadores de Hispania en los diplomas de los soberanos castellanos y leoneses (1065-1230)." 225-247. Hélne Siraintoine's paper examines the extant documents corresponding to Kings Alfonso VI of Castile, Alfonso VII of Castile, Alfonso the Battler of Aragón, and Queen Urraca of Castile, the daughter to Alfonso VI and mother to Alfonso VII. All in all, she covers the years 1065 to 1157. Her aim is to investigate whether those diplomas produced by a rising chancellery, and therefore by a growing body of notaries and public scribes, said anything about the medieval Hispanic empire and about how Hispanic emperors related with the memory of their predecessors. In order to accomplish this, Sirantoine places herself within a less descriptive and much more dynamic and modern concept of diplomatics in which documentation itself must be analyzed not simply as the public account of a given event, but rather as a textual construction. According to Sirantoine, each king's diplomas depicts a complicated memory of his predecessors, thus helping the new king or, as in the case of Urraca, queen, to create a new identity for his or her empire. In the case of Alfonoso VI, the scribes create the illusion of a continuity between his father Fernando I (who, in fact, never used the imperial title "in the first person" 227) and Alfonso himself. Alfonso VI thus invents an imperial memory for his father that helps the new king to create a monarchical identity based on the idea of the imperium Totius Hispaniae or even the imperium Toletanus. Urraca's diplomas are located between two emperors, Alfonso VI and Alfonso the Battler; by referring to the first, she legitimized her role as a Queen of Castile and Leon. Alfonso the Battler, in turn, also has a high number of diplomas referring to him as an emperor or imperator Ispaniae. If Sirantoine is right that the goal was to glorify military exploits rather than to claim the domain of the whole Iberian Peninsula, then imperator would at this moment acquire all its military meaning. Yet Sirantoine never actually questions the semantic and etymological variation of the word. The case of Alfonso VII would be a case of the destruction of imperial memory. Sirantoine establishes here an interesting chronology for the imperial mention in the different diplomas. In this chronology, Sirantoine can see how Alfonso VII first destroys the imperial memory of Alfonso VI in order to create a new identity in which he does not want to become the "emperor of all Spain" but only "the lord of all kings of Spain" (242). After the death of Alfonso VII, he becomes the Emperor, and later historians will refer to him not only as an emperor of the whole Iberian Peninsula but also as a military emperor whose exploits are good for dating diplomas and establishing new and stable temporalities and memories. In my opinion, and despite some minor quibbles and theoretical absences, this is a great paper that furthers our understanding not only of a very complex part of the history of Castile, but also of the workings of the chancellery during the first moments of its development within royal politics.
Isabel Alfonso Antón. "Memoria e identidad en las pesquisas judiciales en el área castellano-leonesa medieval." 249-279. The crown jewel of this collection is Isabel Alfonso Antón's paper about social memory and its interaction with individual memory in the documents regarding judicial pesquisas or inquisitions in the Castilian Middle Ages. Like inquisitions, pesquisas were processes initiated by officers of justice that involved research and interrogations, as well as complete depositions from laymen and clerics alike. Alfonso Antón draws on new theories and practices for the study of these complicated documents. She distinguishes between the thick layers of technicalities provided by the officers of justice, public scribes, and notaries, on the one hand, and the particular performances, attitudes, and expressions that might belong to the actual, deposed individuals, on the other hand. Alfonso Antón's paper is a survey of these performances and expressions in the extant documentation in Castile. She is especially interested in the ages and reputations of the deposed and in the history and dating of memorable events. How did the way people once dated memorable events contribute to the construction of those events? What are the foundations of the "common knowledge" that holds together a particular community (263)? How do the complicated relationships between laymen and clerics shape the processes whereby certain memories become part of this common knowledge and, as such, part of a social memory of a given community? The very concept of social memory, along with its interaction with individual memories, is, in my opinion, what makes this article especially important. The essay supplies both advanced scholars and graduate students with fresh and original ideas about how to read a corpus of documentation that often has been considered as the basis for understanding particular businesses or private and public transactions, but whose cultural value rarely has been studied. In addition, Alfonso Antón, creates a conceptual map, so to speak, to distinguish what belong to the pesquisa itself from what belongs to the individuals who are being deposed. Amidst an invasive technical language, it frequently has been difficult to hear the voices of the latter. Although the article is, as I mentioned, mainly a survey, the insightful readings of particular expressions and documents offer this conceptual map.
José Antonio Jara Fuente. "Consciencia, alteridad y percepción: la construcción de la identidad en la Castilla urbana del siglo XV." 281- 317. As an epilogue to the collection, José Antonio Jara Fuente, who also penned the introduction, examines the complex issues of "consciousness, alterity, and perception" as elements central to the construction of identities in the urban milieu of Castile in the 15th century. Jara Fuente focuses on his specialty, the municipal archives of the city of Cuenca, in order to analyze the creation of "social actors." The two main "actors" in his research are Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, a member of the high nobility, and the city of Cuenca itself, a corporation constituted by local powers. Jara Fuente underscores the importance of the epistles and the entitling clauses--those clauses at the beginning of letters whereby the redactor identifies himself--to understand not only the construction of political identities themselves, but also how this process led to other conflicts as well. The article is frustrating because it treats only limited documentation that, moreover, is not available to the reader (there are no editions of the letters to which Jara Fuente refers). Jara Fuente does not quote or read extensively enough to build a fruitful conversation with his readers. This is regrettable because Cuenca was one of the most important centers of power in 15th century Castile and a better understanding of these sources is essential for Jara Fuente to develop his theoretical conclusions.