Stift und Stadt. Das Heiliggrabpriorat von Santa Anna und das Regularkanonikerstift Santa Eulàlia del Camp im mittelalterlichen Barcelona (1145-1423)

Abstract

Stift und Stadt. Das Heiliggrabpriorat von Santa Anna und das Regular kanonikerstift Santa Eulalia del Camp im mittelalterlichen Barcelona (1145-1423). By Nikolas Jaspert. [Berliner Historische Studien, Band 24. Ordernsstudien, X.] (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. 1996. Pp. 575; 21 maps, 5 tables and graphs. DM 138.00 paperback.) This substantial work, initially Nikolas Jaspert's doctoral dissertation directed by Professor Kaspar Elm and defended in 1994 at the Freie Universitat in Berlin, matured well beyond this stage to be placed by Professor Joachim Ehlers into the Berliner Historische Studien series as the tenth volume about religious orders in the Middle Ages. Rather than a traditional institutional history of one house or the other, this study aims at an histoire totale in the ethnographical style of New Cultural History, integrating the entwined histories of both houses, the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre Priory of Sta. Anna and the Canons Regular convent of Sta. Eulalia, into the fabric of medieval Barcelonan daily life and vibrant civic culture. It is this combination of detail and intricate locality with broader contextualization of the Mediterranean world of the Crusades that is this study's strength. Despite the uniformity attributed by themselves and others to religious and military orders and their official identity, the Canons, Knights, their patrons and beneficiaries, formed intricate communities larger than their houses. These were not artificial, esoteric pre-organized coherent religious movements imported from some far-off inspirational centers, but were spontaneous and self-organizing, indigenous and semi-autonomous, brotherhoods that through affiliation grew into multi-type organizations and far-flung corporations that were highly influential in urban affairs and those of state for more than two centuries. In his introductory chapter and tabular form in his appended source references,Jaspert lays out the archival fonds of Sta. Anna from the Arxiu Diocesa de Barcelona (ADB) which begin in the early 1140's during the resurgence of the crusade against the Muslim Ebro fortress kingdoms of Ilerda and Tortosa and subsequent major expansion of Arago-Catalunya and during the continuing struggle in the Holy Land. These records double in annual production after the 1220's and the Crown's expansion toward Valencia, reaching a crescendo in the 1330-1340's before the decline of the archives in 1350 and the end of the series in 1423 with the union of the priories and Sta. Anna and Sta. Eulalia-the terminus of Jaspert's study. In all, 3,181 originals and 688 transumpts or official copies from the Sta. Anna archives are analyzed in thirty-five diplomatic categories. Their data are augmented by gleanings from twenty other archives, especially the parchment series of the Royal Chancery in the Arxiu Corona d'Arago (ACA) for political context, the see of Barcelona's grand cartulary or Libri Antiquitatum in the cathedral archives, and the ADB's Registra Communium. Jaspert also relied on the more than one hundred published collections of transcribed documents that exist for this region. Jaspert supplies an extensive but not exhaustive fifty-page bibliography of the pertinent secondary literature which admirably crosses all language and political barriers (including contributions from the flourishing American school of medievalists too often ignored by peninsular historians). A larger bibliography exists, of course, for the Canons Regular, the new military and reformed monastic orders, and other religious movements in southern France and northeastern Spain, that could provide even more breadth for this local and regional study. One might have expected its findings to have been related to established generalizations in such institutional surveys for the peninsula as those by Luis G. de Valdeavellano or more regionally by J. M. Font i Rius, or the economic perspectives by J. Vicens Vives. The bibliography itself is presented in a vademecum style, a hybrid Social Science and Humanities system of its own, with short author-title-page references to the full citations in the bibliography. …