Eva-Maria Cersovsky, Universität zu Köln
Abstract: The research project outlined in this contribution aims at offering new insights into an important but underexplored group of actors at late medieval royal courts by putting craftspeople at the centre of analysis. It takes the courts of the kings and queens of the Crown of Aragón as its focus to investigate the multifaceted relationships they formed with artisans from the end of the thirteenth to the beginning of the fifteenth century. The project pursues three main objectives: First, it explores and compares the forms of affiliation, the status, tasks, functions, material resources, and working conditions of the many different artisans serving the royal households. Second, it examines the role of courts as spaces of artisanal training, production and knowledge, cooperation and competition. Third, it illuminates the activities of craftspeople in-between courtly and civic environments. The project’s findings thus promise to foster a better understanding of artisans’ economic and social interactions with royal households, while also offering new perspectives for studying court economy and court culture.
Late medieval courts attracted a wide variety of different craftspeople.1 Numerous experts specialising in the food, wood, metal, or textile crafts were commissioned by princely and royal households to create products of various kinds. It is well known that medieval rulers both acquired large quantities of artisanal luxury objects and needed countless craft products for everyday use. Noble patrons, courtly material culture, and patterns of consumption have been at the focus of historical scholarship for quite some time. However, to date, only a few historians have attempted to put artisans, the makers of courtly objects, at the centre of monographic studies in order to systematically determine the multifaceted work-related and social relationships they formed with late medieval courts.
My book project (Habilitation), still in its early stages and tentatively outlined in the following, aims at filling this gap by taking the late medieval courts of the kings and queens of the Crown of Aragón as its focus. The Aragonese courts hold particular potential for the study of craftspeople since they did not only constitute important political and social centres formed around a ruler but were also dynamic economic and cultural hubs within the Mediterranean, attracting various people from different social and religious groups, regions, and cultures. They employed, to just name a few examples, Catalan bakers, French tailors, or German goldsmiths, Jewish candle makers, Muslim construction workers, or Christian carpenters in a variety of different institutional affiliations and socio-economic interdependencies. Some artisans also performed services for queens and kings that went beyond their specific craft, such as buying goods for the royal household, joining diplomatic missions, or functioning as administrators involved in the foundation of monasteries or the overseeing of royal mills. These ways in which different craftspeople were connected to the kings’ and queens’ courts economically and socially have yet to be studied in a comprehensive and comparative approach, as has the question of how royal courts functioned as sites of artisanal production, collaboration, and knowledge – with both patrons and craftspeople as active participants.
Since the courts of the Crown of Aragón are documented exceptionally well, especially from the thirteenth century onwards, it is possible to trace such questions in a wide variety of sources, mainly housed in the Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó in Barcelona. The project will, for example, draw on court ceremonials characterising court personnel and their duties as well as on various household accounts that document payments to artisans holding court offices and to many other craftspeople for commissions of differing nature, often including detailed descriptions of the final products and their materials. It will also utilize a small number of account books written by the artisans themselves which have survived in the royal archives, and make use of the numerous royal chancellery registers documenting contracts, letters, privileges granted to artisans, or recommendations of specific craftspeople to other institutions. Additionally, I will employ inventories which list objects in varying detail and frequently mention who created them, where they were made, and/or – in the case of objects in relation to specific court offices – who used and took care of them.
Seeing the quantity and variety of available sources, the project’s main focus is on a ‘long fourteenth century’, from the reign of James II (1291–1327) to the reign of Martin I (1396–1410). This period also holds an important place within scholarly discussions on how artisans’ relationships to courts developed over time, both in the Crown of Aragón and other regions. These debates concern, for instance, the perception and status of craftspeople as ‘artisans’ or ‘artists’, the inclusion of artisans into the circle of royal familiares, or the emergence of new legal and institutional forms of ‘court craft’ (‘Hofhandwerk’) or ‘court art (‘Hofkunst’) and their position between court and city.
Contributing to these discussions and expanding the state of research, the project adopts a multifaceted, comparative approach. It employs the terms ‘craftspeople’ and ‘artisans’ in a broad sense to grasp and include not only renowned individuals but all people who used their hands and tools to produce, repair, or redesign products, including food as well as objects made from different materials. It also starts from the written documentation and not from objects or architecture still present today. This way, the project seeks to make a systematic effort at both establishing and comparing the variety of craftspeople connected to Aragonese courts, thereby bridging the common division between groups of different objects, materials, and/or artisans. Furthermore, it focuses on both the kings’ and the queens’ households over a longer period of time to delineate similarities and differences in the artisanal personnel serving them. As first case studies suggest, this approach promises to yield fruitful results regarding the activities, status, and career options of craftspeople working across different courts. Following this general methodological framework, the project has three main objectives that build on one another:
First, it seeks to investigate which artisans were integrated into the courts’ economic and social networks and in what ways, including how these connections were formed in the first place. Answering these questions involves inquiries into the social backgrounds, status, tasks, functions, working conditions, material resources, and careers of different craftspeople serving royal courts. Without pursuing the goal of a detailed prosopography or comprehensive network analysis, the available, relevant personal data concerning the artisans will be collected in a database, which will then form the basis for more detailed case studies on a selected number of individual craftspeople and groups of artisans. Moreover, approaching the different types of connections between craftspeople and courts necessitates semantic analyses, for example, regarding the (variable and shifting) meanings connected to titles of court offices, such as panicer, or denominations like de la casa de la senyora reyna/ del senyor rey.
Second, the project aims at analysing how royal courts functioned as spaces of artisanal production and knowledge, cooperation and competition. This includes questions on forms of training and the transmission of knowledge, on artisanal migration and interreligious collaborations and/or conflicts. Understanding artisans working for the Aragonese courts as experts possessing specialized knowledge and skills to understand, (re-)design, and invent things, I will build on the insights of both art historical research and studies on material culture to examine repositories of knowledge connected to objects, practices, and their textual representations, such as descriptions in account books and inventories. By examining experts from different regions and religious groups gathered at Aragonese courts, the project will also draw on concepts of ‘cultural brokerage’ and discuss whether artisans can be conceived as ‘brokers’ even if their primary aim might not have been cultural mediation as such.
Third, the research project seeks to illuminate the interplay between courtly and urban craft production and the positions of artisans in-between courts and cities – spaces with permeable boundaries. Exploring these aspects brings into focus, for example, the use of urban infrastructure, the role of artisanal court personnel as intermediaries hiring additional workers, or the existence of royal privileges obtained by individuals or craft groups regulating their status in relation to civic norms and institutions. Choosing one or two cities with royal residences as case studies, such as Barcelona, València, or Zaragoza, this part of the project also tentatively aims at including civic sources. Municipal ordinances, the documentation of confraternities and guilds, inventories, and other notarial documents help trace the activities of artisans in urban contexts and may also be used to conduct further prosopographical research on the identities of selected craftspeople. These sources, however, will mostly be consulted after the examination of the royal documentation.
Based on rich source material and building on insights as well as approaches of interdisciplinary scholarship, the project thus seeks to foster a better understanding of craftspeople as an important but underexplored group of actors connected to late medieval courts within the Crown of Aragón. Its findings promise to shed new light on artisans’ economic and social agency in the context of royal households and to offer new perspectives on both court economy and court culture.
Selected Bibliography
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Photo: December Calendar Page, Baking Bread, in: Psalter by an unknown artist/ maker, mid-1200s, Bruges (possibly), Belgium, in: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. 14 (85.MK.239), fol. 8v (Detail). Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program, URL: [https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/105TRQ] (03.07.2024).
- References to some publications relevant to the project can be found in a selected bibliography at the end of the contribution. [↩]
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Eva-Maria Cersovsky (3. Juli 2024). Courts and Craftspeople in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragón. Blog der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Iberomediaevistik. Abgerufen am 12. Dezember 2024 von https://doi.org/10.58079/11xhy