Objectives
Economic history, despite several criticisms
about its presumable historiographical crisis, display an enviable vitality,
which is evident through a number of projects, meetings and publicashions about
this discipline. As far as the middle ages are concerned, it is worth stressing
the existence of recent major international projects upon economic growth,
wealth circulation, credit and indebtedness, famine and inflation, public
finances and urban taxation. Particularly within medieval economic history,
perhaps one the fields upon which such a vitality has been more clearly perceived
has been urban history, not only in institutional -fiscal and financial- aspects
or those concerning production, such as trade and manufacture, but very
especially in that issue which represented the main preoccuppation of urban
authorities: supplying the city. Feeding
the city was not only a major urban issue –especially in cities with thousends
of inhabitants devoted to non-agricultural activities- but also a colossal
business for the merchants in charge of ensuring the arrival of provisions; and
in turn, feeding the city was the
name of a research project that developed originally in London during the
1990s, which has been applied to other European cities thereafer, such as
Valencia from 2012 to 2014.
Such an interest for urban economies constrasts with the scarce attention that historians have paid to the economy of royal and noble courts. History of courts, the supreme space for political power, was affected for the disrepute of political and institutional history in the first half of the twentieth century. This negative notion began to change, firstly, due to Norbert Elias’ contributions, which stressed the role of the court over culture, behaviours and social practice of elites, reinforced in turn by the historiographical renewal embodied by new political history and its decisive interest in the political, rather than in politics. However, one needs to wait to the late twentieth century to witness the first economically focused studies on the court, which can be seen in the works by Maurice Aymard and Marzio Achille Romani (1998). These draw on analitical cathegories based upon economic anthropology, such as ‘prestige economy’, ‘sumptuary expense’ and ‘conspicious destruction of wealth’. More recent contributions have been developed by Gerhard Fouquet, Jan Hirschbiegel, Werner Paravicini in the 2008, which have led them to talk about Hofwirtschaft (‘court economy’) as a concept in inself. Therefore, a new path that understands the court as an economic institution have made its way among historians, which attempts to fulfill several aims:
We would like to remind to all candidates that this conference does not intend to study the political or institutional relations between towns, nor between the royal or noble power and their officials. The interest is on the economic –material, commercial, financial- relationships between towns and townsmen, on the one hand, and the courts –insofar as society, as the group of servants and courtiers that lived in the direct environment of the king of the nobility- on the other, focusing especially on the contribution of towns to the supplying and funding of the court and its personnel.
Finally, we remember that the period of study is restricted to the later middle ages, when the courts began their sedentarisation and, moreover, when account books and income-and-expense registers proliferated in such a way that makes possible the analysis of economic relations that we purposed in this conference. And we also remember that our geographic scope are the Iberian kingdoms –Crown of Aragon, Castile, Navarre and Portugal–, although in the case of the Crown of Aragon their non-Iberian states -Sardinia, Naples and Sicily- will also be included.
Alexandra Beauchamp, Université de Limoges
& Antoni Furió, Universitat de València
Such an interest for urban economies constrasts with the scarce attention that historians have paid to the economy of royal and noble courts. History of courts, the supreme space for political power, was affected for the disrepute of political and institutional history in the first half of the twentieth century. This negative notion began to change, firstly, due to Norbert Elias’ contributions, which stressed the role of the court over culture, behaviours and social practice of elites, reinforced in turn by the historiographical renewal embodied by new political history and its decisive interest in the political, rather than in politics. However, one needs to wait to the late twentieth century to witness the first economically focused studies on the court, which can be seen in the works by Maurice Aymard and Marzio Achille Romani (1998). These draw on analitical cathegories based upon economic anthropology, such as ‘prestige economy’, ‘sumptuary expense’ and ‘conspicious destruction of wealth’. More recent contributions have been developed by Gerhard Fouquet, Jan Hirschbiegel, Werner Paravicini in the 2008, which have led them to talk about Hofwirtschaft (‘court economy’) as a concept in inself. Therefore, a new path that understands the court as an economic institution have made its way among historians, which attempts to fulfill several aims:
- studying administrative, institutional and bureaucratic characteristics of economic and financial economic organisation of the court.
- analysing its economic role within the context of royal and nobel finances, especially in relation to the political repercussion of economic distribution among the members of the court (i.e. gifts, grants and the like).
- hihglighting the notion of ‘purchasing power society’ of the elites that formed the court.
- stressing the chronic court indebtedness and its repercussin for the royal and noble power in general terms.
- analising the economic reasons –self-consumption, taxation- that can explain court roaming, as well as the opposit phenomenon, that is the progressive sedentarisation, which has been rarely studied at the same level than the role of political justification.
- studying the relations between the court and the luxury economy, interpreting the relevance of this sort of consumption in such a hierarchised society as the court one, in which simbolism and representations of social order and power depict a central role.
We would like to remind to all candidates that this conference does not intend to study the political or institutional relations between towns, nor between the royal or noble power and their officials. The interest is on the economic –material, commercial, financial- relationships between towns and townsmen, on the one hand, and the courts –insofar as society, as the group of servants and courtiers that lived in the direct environment of the king of the nobility- on the other, focusing especially on the contribution of towns to the supplying and funding of the court and its personnel.
Finally, we remember that the period of study is restricted to the later middle ages, when the courts began their sedentarisation and, moreover, when account books and income-and-expense registers proliferated in such a way that makes possible the analysis of economic relations that we purposed in this conference. And we also remember that our geographic scope are the Iberian kingdoms –Crown of Aragon, Castile, Navarre and Portugal–, although in the case of the Crown of Aragon their non-Iberian states -Sardinia, Naples and Sicily- will also be included.
Alexandra Beauchamp, Université de Limoges
& Antoni Furió, Universitat de València