María Ángeles Martín Romera: Civic Literacy in Iberia: testing the frontiers of medievalism and its sources

Even more than the Early Modern period, medieval historiography is heavily constrained by the limited surviving corpus of sources. These scarcity of documents is generally accepted as the natural frontier of our knowledge and understood as a critical factor in the sort of history that we as historians can write. However, there have been no attempts to model that bias nor systematise how the complex phenomena of orality/literacy, preservation and survival of documents have determined the prevailing narratives in our field. In this talk I discuss a proposal for a new methodology to navigate the triad: medieval sociopolitical reality - medieval documents - historiographical constructions. The focus of the project will be the Iberian late medieval urban world, a field with significant peculiarities and a noteworthy scarcity of sources. However, the resulting model will be applicable to other regional and national realities, since the objective is to dissect firstly, the relation between the complexity of late medieval interactions and the documents produced/preserved, secondly, the relation between the medieval corpus available as a whole and the prevailing trends in national historiographies.

• Zeit: 16-18 Uhr c.t.