Session Abstract

In a classic formulation in 1995, Richard Kagan outlined the differences between an official Habsburg historiography, written in service of the Spanish crown, and a thriving tradition of regional or city histories, expressing a “particularized” vision of the past often in counterpoint to official royal history.  More recently, Guy Lazure has highlighted the religious dimension of such histories by examining Philip II’s appropriation of local histories through centralized relic collection at the Escorial.  For Philip, legitimacy of rule was tied into a vision of a sacred Spanish past, stretching in an unbroken tradition to apostolic times and marked by continual struggle against heresy and unbelievers.  His collection of the relics of Spanish saints was a visible representation of that sacred identity in which the king “both claimed and shared his sovereignty” with the cities and regions of the kingdom. 

Nowhere was the tension between center and periphery in sacred historiography more acute than in the Crown of Aragon.  This realm faced a number of challenges in the centuries between 1350 and 1650 that propelled several experiments in the presentation of its sacred past.  Late medieval monarchs attempting to consolidate and extend royal power faced opposition from fractious nobles and independent-minded regions, while, following the union of Castile and Aragon, the region struggled to retain a degree of autonomy from the Spanish crown.  Religious tensions were high, from the papal Schism and intensified efforts to convert Jews and Muslims of the fourteenth century, well into the sixteenth century, with suspicion of newly-converted Jews and Muslims as well as the fear of Protestant sympathizers.  In such an atmosphere, establishing a sacred history for the region and its people provided a source of legitimacy, identity, and community.

The papers in this panel explore three ways in which Aragonese agents reached back to a sacred past through the writing of history or through associating themselves with sacred objects.  Michael Ryan shows a royal donor using sacred objects to link his own power to a sacred past.  Specifically, Ryan explores the ways in which King Martí (r. 1395-1410) used gifts of relics to key monasteries and churches to establish a sacred royal presence throughout the kingdom that would underscore his claims to secular authority.  Robin Vose turns, instead, to the writing of a sophisticated, authoritative history by the realm’s sixteenth-century Dominicans.  Vose’s Dominican authors inscribed their order’s notorious association with Inquisitorial persecution within an archivally-based narrative of Dominican history, presenting Inquisition as a legitimate and sacred vocation.  Laura Smoller’s talk shows early modern authors blending hagiography and the history of sacred objects to trace the story of the Holy Grail’s arrival in Valencia.  Post-Tridentine authors wove together contemporary history with “pious fiction,” making Valencia a place with an unbroken sacred tradition stretching back the days of the early Christian martyrs.  Together, these papers reveal a variety of uses of a sacred past to make claims of legitimacy for the crown, the region, and a religious community, against a backdrop of political change and religious tension.