Clerks and Kings: Empire and the Politics of Knowledge in 13th Century Spain

Catalog description

The rise of clerical culture in thirteenth-century Iberia has yet to receive the attention that it fully deserves, especially in its social and political context. Spanish cultural history has often subordinated the manifestations of clerical culture to a sort of narrow, text-bound philology, generally disregarding its intellectual matter, its social matrix, and its clear ties to a broader European academic milieu, preferring to privilege largely literary forms of cultural expression. With few exceptions the larger cultural importance of the mester de clerecia in thirteenth century Iberia has been met mostly with indifference. Yet the period in which the mester de clerecia flourished is one of intense scholarly curiosity and exploration in all fields of culture, especially religion, politics, science, and philosophy, and marks an awakening of enormous interest in all things, leading to the production of vast bodies of new knowledge, all of which presents two problems: one, the moral efficacy and legitimacy of that knowledge; and two, the cultivation of methods for categorizing, organizing, analyzing, and using it. On the one hand, the discovery of new knowledge produced an age of taxonomies, archives, tools, and methodologies for dealing with and using it; and on the other, it triggered anxieties and set off philosophical and theological polemics and disputes that both emphasized and questioned the very ability of knowledge to know what it claimed to know. In this course, we will examine how the mester de clerecia, especially through the vernacular Libro de Alexandre (The Book of Alexander the Great) brings to its Castilian audience the scholarly ethical and political problematic that points to the mester's links with the cosmopolitan world of the universities, European statecraft, clerks and the affairs of the royal court, especially in relation to nascent imperial…