Current Issue

Jump to:
Introduction
Letter
Reviews
Articles
Abstracts

Announcements
Call for papers #37

Ruiz, Teófilo F. From Heaven to Earth: The Reordering of Castilian Society, 1150-1350. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. iv + 221 pp.

Medieval Castile needed this book. The argument is that the decades surrounding 1200 saw a shift in Castilians' values and in their relationship with each other and with the sacred. As the concerns of merchants, lower nobility, clerics, and local bureaucrats that Ruiz calls "the middling sorts" became normative, people thought in new ways about such diverse topics as property, salvation, charity, and power. Ruiz submits that the changes in these areas were connected and collectively reflected a "reordering of mental, spiritual, and physical space" (3) that was related to a growing importance of lay rather than ecclesiastical influence.
Though this thesis is not especially surprising, demonstrating this dynamic for Castile is a significant achievement. Taking his title from a lecture by Jacques Le Goff, who he notes was his main inspiration, Ruiz says works by Le Goff and countless others on cultural change do not consider the social and cultural life of Iberia. Partly this is because the sources usually enlisted to study the transformation from heaven to earth in other regions - university debates and literary works - are not as plentiful for Castile. Instead, Ruiz offers a compelling case based primarily on over one thousand wills and donations. Most are from northern Castile, dating from the ninth to the mid-fourteenth centuries. They are supplemented by literary sources and legal codes.
One intriguing pattern that emerges is that almost all wills and donations before the 1220s bequeathed land to a single church or monastery for no purpose more specific than the "remedy" of the donor's soul or the remission of sins. After this decade, however, donors were more likely to give money to church institutions and reserve land for family members, they were more apt to give to several different churches or monasteries, and they often specified services they expected the monks, nuns, and priests to perform. These might include an exact number of Masses for the donor's soul, anniversary Masses, or sponsorship of pilgrims. Wills in towns along the route to Santiago de Compostela were among the first to manifest these changes, and also the first to appear in Castilian rather than in Latin. The vernacular gave donors more control over the redaction and the terms of these documents. Ruiz suggests that the triumph of Castilian and the growing practice of negotiating for salvation both reflected and helped cause a "democratization" in the relationship between the middling sorts and other groups.
A similar shift occurred in donors' concern for the poor. Wills containing provisions for feeding and clothing the poor became more frequent after 1250. Such stipulations were secondary to other provisions and normally involved a small fraction of the donor's assets. Moreover, these wills typically directed executors to feed and clothe a small and symbolic number of the poor (often ten or twelve) on the day of the donor's burial or death anniversary, sometimes literally over the tomb itself. Donors thus used charity to gain prayers or remembrance. By specifying the exact type of food and clothing (burlap, sackcloth), they also, consciously or unconsciously, reinforced the social hierarchy and marked their own place in it. In addition, documents from the late twelfth century reveal an increased concern with marking territory. Wills and sales of property contained more precise landmarks, and monasteries undertook detailed inventories of their valuable objects.
As the concerns of the middling sorts took hold and Christian settlement spread south, ideas about kingship also evolved. Responding directly and vigorously to José Manuel Nieto Soria's arguments for a sacral monarchy in Castile, Ruiz argues that Castilian kings gained legitimacy not by crowning or anointing but by military victory and the expansion of the kingdom's boundaries. This was consistent with the diminishing influence of the church in other practices and with the growing concern for land and its marking.
Ruiz insists that this shift from heaven to earth was due to multiple causes. It was not due to the Reconquest, casually used to explain so many features of medieval Castile. The shift occurred first in northern Castile, far from the drama of the expansion. The influx of ideas from abroad, invoked all too often to account for cultural developments in the peninsula, also fails to explain it. Rather, it occurred on the ground and at the local level. Ruiz's dogged research and astute use of sources has established that in Castile, as in the rest of western Europe, the emergence of a bourgeoisie effected broad social and cultural transformations.

Anne Marie Wolf
University of Portland