Preliminary Programme

The testimonies complaining to the royal power about affronts, excesses and outrages can be channelled through different forms of expression, which generally fall into the category of what we might call disciplined dissent. They never however go too far, towards rebellion or open conflict. This restraint would be explained by the very nature of the relationship that bound the cities to the king. In their writings, the petitioners demand that methods of calculated expression and dissent management be developed, aimed at eliciting a favourable political response. Generally speaking they appear as polite requests and demands for attention and, in the Late Middle Ages, the complaints come from different urban groups, offering evidence of greater variety in the problems and also in the strategies, the arguments and the political conduct of the petitioners. In both the Hermandad pacts and the parliamentary petitions, including specific requests by cities, towns and urban groups, strategies and forms of action can be observed and compared. From them we can discern the wish not to overstep the bounds of a framework of disciplined dissent, which tries to maintain respect for and obedience to the king in order not to go any further than the provision of the specific matters mentioned. It is a strategy of political struggle that nevertheless seems at some point to have gone from respect and obedience by the king’s vassals to submission and acceptance of the sovereign will as shown by the subjects. The cities’ requests seem to correspond to collective urban standpoints as the respect for the fueros (laws) and to preserve the peace of the kingdom. (Show less)

Disciplined dissent can be defined as an approach whereby the discontented or excluded attempt to rectify their situation not by violence or by confrontation but by working through existing institutions and processes and by recourse to the framework of ideas used by those who hold political, social and indeed cultural power. Disciplined dissent can take many forms and can function in a variety of contexts. This essay will examine some of these forms and contexts in England of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It will examine the political context of opposition to royal policies in parliament and through the mechanism of petitioning, where the language deployed, such as the interests of the community of the realm and the identification of bad counsel, deflects any implications of treason and rebellion. The socio-economic dimension will be represented by peasant action against manorial lords that is confined to the law courts, both seigniorial and royal, with appeals, for example, to notions such as the custom of the manor. Other forms of dissent are in opposition to the prevailing social order rather than being overtly political, in that they challenge social exclusion rather than direct social and political control. One example of this is the exclusion of non or sub knightly landowners from the ranks of those enjoying noble or gentle status, a situation that was amended during the course of the fourteenth century not by legislation but by the continual actions of those who were pressing for recognition. The essay will also explore the strategies of disciplined opposition that were available to women in this period, as they strove to exercise a degree of autonomy. In these areas I will have recourse to visual expressions such as sepulchral monuments and heraldry as well as to the evidence of sumptuary legislation and the insights provide by the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. (Show less)

In this paper, Fynn-Paul will analyze the changes that took place in the political culture of Manresa over the later medieval period, roughly from 1348 until 1500, in terms of the theory of ‘disciplined dissent.’ In Manresa, it can be observed that there was relatively little political differentiation amongst urban elites prior to 1392, when Joan I implemented a new urban electoral policy, similar to those which had been recently passed in Barcelona. Prior to 1392, election to Manresan urban government had been done entirely on the basis of one’s being a ‘citizen.’ This was an old status which was routinely granted to roughly the top 20% of male Manresan householders in terms of wealth. Under this system, the possession of even a middling fortune was enough to earn one a chance to sit as a jurat or conseller in the town council. But the top-down reform of 1392 now, by fiat, divided this relatively small group of ‘citizens’ in to three strata: the ‘citizens’ (a status held by rentiers and lawyers, who were in practice the wealthiest men in the city), the ‘merchants,’ (who were in practice about half as wealthy as the citizens), and the ‘menestrals’ (or ‘workers,’ a status which was in practice accorded to only those masters and wholesalers whose wealth was roughly equivalent to that of a merchant). We know that at Barcelona, within a generation, the newly-created upper stratum of urban citizens began to call themselves ‘honored citizens’ to further elevate their status, and they claimed expanding privileges for themselves, at the expense of the merchants and menestrals, who had previously been their equals. However, the would-be marginalized groups soon began to organize themselves into a party known as the ‘busca,’ who utilized their status as urban citizens and as urban officeholders to dissent from this possible monopolization of power by the ‘citizens’, who began to arrogate to themselves the term ‘honored citizens.’ This disciplined dissent was often non-revolutionary and in fact involved a very subtle manipulation of current legal and political norms. Enough background work on political life has now been done to show that the novel application of the paradigm of disciplined dissent will readily provide analytical benefits to our understanding of urban politics in late medieval Catalonia. This chapter proposes to share the fruits of a detailed archival investigation of how the rhetoric and strategies of the Manresan ‘busca’, i.e., the merchants and the menestrals, did and did not resemble ‘disciplined dissent’. It will also analyze the ways in which the Manresan ‘citizens’ (corresponding to the biga of Barcelona) attempted to overcome or manage this disciplined dissent from their fellow (but ostensibly lower-ranking) elites. (Show less)

The paper’s topic is marriage and it covers the extended rite of passage (from the promise to the exchange of vows and consolidation of the relationship), familial and social pressures, and Episcopal jurisdiction over such unions in the diocese of Catania. The chronological period extends from end of the XIV century –the time when an archive of the spiritual court is available- to the Tametsi decree (1563). The decree established the control of the church on marriage formation. The aim is consider how a vast social sector that does not correspond to the elite improves its margins of freedom through mediation with the Episcopal court; the reactions of individuals and groups to Episcopal and familial social control policies; the presence of familial models other than the Christian one; and the supposed Mediterranean peculiarity in family formation and relationships. Through a comparison of the ecclesiastical courts’ activity I will argue that artisans and working groups - men and women - were capable of contesting social control policies according to forms of disciplined dissent. The connection proposed mainly by women between social order and marriages realized according to the principle of consent gradually ensured the court’s openness to the petitions of unions’ dissolution. According to the agency theory which highlights the role of people generally considered at the margins of the society, I would like to stress the gradual ability of women to criticize the patriarchal model in extraordinary circumstances and in the ordinary too. My materials suggest that marriage’s rite of passage could make women free of subordination, i.e. by refusing the man imposed by the father and pursuing a different union. (Show less)