Speaking Truth to Power: Authority, Social Status, and Gender in Thirteenth-Century Castilian Witness Testimony
- Autores: Janna Bianchini
- Localización: A Plural Peninsula: Studies in Honour of Professor Simon Barton / coord. por Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, 2023, ISBN 9789004425460, págs. 457-480
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
In 1220 a monk of the monastery of San Zoilo de Carrión, in the kingdom of Castile, oversaw the collection of witness testimony to establish San Zoilo’s rights in certain churches in the diocese of Palencia. In their testimony, at least 153 men and 12 women reported what they knew about the local privileges of two great ecclesiastical lords, the monastery of San Zoilo and the bishop of Palencia. In doing so, they also asserted their own authority as individuals and as a community. Their participation in this legal process offered the witnesses a rare chance to air their knowledge and opinions in a context where such knowledge and opinions mattered a great deal to their episcopal or monastic overlords. The act of testifying, therefore, offered townspeople access to forms of power that were normally not available to them. In the face of this opportunity, they employed various strategies to advance their own interests, whether it was to declare their status within their communities, constrain the actions of their lords, or even protect themselves from potential reprisal. Still, the authority they claimed was inevitably circumscribed by the much greater power of the ecclesiastical lords whose disputes demanded their testimony.