Thomas Devaney
"Public Ritual and the Frontier Experience in Castile and the Latin East, 1085-1492"
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Abstract
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My dissertation, the first to compare public ritual in the frontier regions of medieval Castile and Cyprus, will examine the nature and significance of the social and cultural transformations experienced by the inhabitants of these borderlands. By comparing the elite perspective of written descriptions of public rituals with archival evidence that reveals popular responses to such spectacles, I will analyze how Christian settlers articulated their experiences of frontier life. Festivals and rituals were a locus for all orders of society to articulate their understandings of the social order. Although the initiative seems often to have been on the side of elites, conversations were taking place, more or less candidly, about the nature of frontier society and its priorities and values. Rulers used public ritual as a means of making an argument and I argue that such an argument could not be one sided. How did peoples of frontier societies experience the rituals and festivals orchestrated by their rulers? How did they respond? How did they express alternate conceptions of society? A shift in our understanding of frontier festivals to a model of negotiated, adapted and multiple meanings will allow a more complete understanding of medieval borderlands. With support from the Council for European Studies, I will begin my research in the archives of two former frontier cities in Spain, Valladolid and Jaén. There, I will examine the municipal council records, court cases, and local ecclesiastic documents that can offer a more complete picture of frontier ritual that can chronicles alone.
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