[211] The Barcelona elite cast cultura in a variety of roles, and, like all accomplished thespians, it changed costumes with ease. In the guise of formal education, "culture" was pressed into service to convert economic resources into professional identity, social prestige, and political influence. The ruling class also used it as a mythic schema to define and justify hierarchies of wealth, status, and power, thus laying the foundations for a new vision of aristocratic selfhood. Finally, patricians wielded cultura to delineate class boundaries within the larger pageant of urban society, much as a stage-manager would assign parts, hand out scripts, and block out the players' every move until the final curtain. Or such, at least, was their intention.

In the preceding pages I have placed overriding emphasis on the elite's manipulation of "culture" as a test separating high and low. In my view, this approach does justice to the remarkably instrumental way in which urban notables appropriated the concept to forge their collective identity. I have moreover argued that a notion of cultural distinction gradually won epistemological primacy in the elite's perception of contemporary social relations. Cultura did more than to envelop traditional inequalities in a new semantic. While providing a compelling mythos for the whole of the body social, it formed the core of a novel class consciousness.

To some the uncompromising dichotomy between "high" and "low" depicted above may seem overdrawn. Yet this starkly [212] reductionist schema accurately reflects how the Barcelona ruling class construed the society over which it claimed power and preeminence. I was struck time and again during the course of my readings by the lack of mediating vision within the world-view of the privileged. Theirs was a universe admitting few ambiguities. No shaded lines blurred the boundaries of their mental maps.

Tracing the origins and chronology of the expanding role of cultura in the elite's articulation of social boundaries is a daunting task. Few historical records invite precise dating of the language of a collective world-view. It is nevertheless clear that the "rise" of the liberal professionals did much to bind the urban elite to learning and formal education. The conceptual schema separating high and low on the basis of the relative acquisition of cultura was in the first instance an ideology of upwardly mobile sectors within urban society. This proved most evident in the case of barristers' arguments for the noble status of their profession. Equally patent assertions of the power of "culture" to confer high social standing colored the biography of newly ennobled patricians like D. Pau Ignasi de Dalmases. An extensive program of artistic and literary patronage capped the rapid elevation of his family from provincial obscurity to the center of the Barcelona elite. As we have seen, Dalmases' projects included remodelling a lavish palace on the Carrer de Montcada, long the preferred residential quarter of the city's mercantile nouveaux riches. He moreover accompanied this renovation with the flood of scholarly activity that culminated in the founding of the Desconfiats Academy in his own library--a collection graced by numerous genealogies, noble chronicles, and heraldic treatises. ⁽¹⁾

It would nevertheless be a fundamental mistake to reduce [213] the functions of learned "culture" to an apologia for the upwardly ascendent. Mechanistic interpretations of this sort fail to account for a far more significant pattern of change--the coalescence of a new, unified ruling class. The adoption by all urban notables of an ideal of cultura depended ultimately on the transformation of the existing nobility. After all, the leading role in local literary and artistic patronage was assumed by the peerage, a group whose social standing could hardly be impugned. Titled aristocrats like the Cardona, Requesens, Montcada, Rocabertí, and Pinós proved the most assiduous Catalan supporters of learning and the fine arts both within the Principality and beyond its confines. At the same time, individual members of these families contributed significantly to the literary corpus of the Siglo de Oro. ⁽²⁾ These were obviously not parvenus making their way up in society through the visible display of "culture." Rather, one finds more fitting analogues among the characters of works like The Book of the Courtier, which depicted nobles groping about for new public roles in the wake of the dramatic changes of the later Middle Ages. The authorship in 1671 of a treatise on military geometry by D. Pedro Antonio Ramón Folch de Cardona--the last direct male descendant of his lineage--symbolized the new route taken by these aristocrats. The contrast between the mastery of intricate mathematical formulae shown in this work and the well-known anecdotes of the rude and unlettered Cardona nobles of the thirteenth century reveals this family's degree of adaptability. ⁽³⁾ Theirs was clearly a change ensuring that all other things would remain the same.

History provided the ground of learning most frequently cultivated by both old and new notables. There lawyers and peers met on equal footing, with the professional demands on [214]the former matching in intensity the personal and familial interests (and vanities) of the latter. The noble chroniclers D. Ramón Dalmau de Rocaberti, his distant cousin D. Diego de Rocabertí, and D. Francesch de Montcada shared a common devotion to historical erudition with jurists like Jeroni Pujades and Diego Montfar i Sorts. ⁽⁴⁾ Yet, in citing these particular examples, I do not wish to imply that there were no "cultivated" aristocrats in Catalonia prior to the seventeenth century. The careers of sixteenth-century nobles like the jurist Antoni Agusti, the militar Francesch Caica, and of the honored citizens Joan Boscá, Guillem de Santcliment, and Galceran Albanell clearly belie any such interpretation. ⁽⁵⁾ Nor would I affirm that all subsequent urban nobles followed in the footsteps of such learned individuals. To the contrary, I have tried to show that although the topoi of formal education figured prominently in expressions of aristocratic cultura, nobles did not articulate their sense of identity exclusively through the language of erudition. Their collective world-view also found expression in a distinctive style of life which embraced spheres as diverse as language, speech, gestures, leisure habits, and festive behavior. Few early modern Barcelonan nobles resembled Signor Pococurante, the weary Venetian aristocrat whose asphyxiating erudition and refinement [215] Voltaire satirized so brilliantly. ⁽⁶⁾ More typical were the examples of Creixell and Maldá--enthusiastic participants in aristocratic rituals and entertainments, seldom prone to displays of bookish learning, yet ever mindful of the ways in which their existence had been effectively walled off from the customs and beliefs of the "lower" orders.

The neo-foral period in particular witnessed the extension of cultura from the preserve of isolated individuals to the ruling class as a whole. The political stability beginning in this era-- interrupted only briefly during the first two decades of the following century--encouraged a decisive shift in the attitudes and behavior of the local ruling class. Growing aristocratic exclusivism accompanied the urban elite's waning enthusiasm for politics. Meanwhile, increased theatricality on the part of an upper class retreating into the confines of its palaces compensated for and ultimately contributed to the atrophy of traditional communal celebrations.

Later centuries would enhance and even transform the public functions of elite "culture." The channels of access to the ruling class through education would undergo expansion, while the turn to romanticism led attitudes toward certain hitherto-denigrated qualities like "passion" to suffer a reversal during the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the overall schema of cultural distinction has persisted to the present day as a mythic explanation for the existence of political and social inequality. In searching for the origins of this familiar structure of domination, we might well consider the tale told herein. In the words of Prospero: "What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time? If thou rememb'rest aught ere thou cam'st here, how thou cam'st here thou mayst." 

1. "Biblioteca Dalmases." Unfortunately, the terseness of local notarial records has frustrated study of aristocratic ownership of books. Many early modern inventories give full titles only for the professional libraries of lawyers and physicians. It is not unusual to find a nobleman's library summarily described as "one hundred fifteen small and large history books by diverse authors" (1694 inventory of D. Josep Pons de Çacosta i Castellví, in A.H.P.B./Vicente Gavarro menor, Lib. Invent. Almon. 1689-1706, no. 19).

2. See, for example, Rubió Balaguer, Cardona.

3. Cardona, Geometría Militar. The inventory of the magnificent library he donated to the monastery of Poblet is found in B.P.T./Ms. 220. Valls Taverner remarked the proverbial ignorance of Cardona's medieval forebears in his "Abogados," 306-309. Other references to the lack of letters among fifteenth-century Spanish nobles are found in Russell, "Arms versus Letters."

4. Ramón Dalmau's Discurso Apologético of 1647 displayed an impressive range of legal and historical erudition, particularly in Latin and Italian. He also authored a history of the Casa de los Condes de Peralada (Madrid, 1651). D. Diego de Rocabertí edited his rhymed Epítome Histórico 1626; two years later he compiled a lengthy family history (Genealogía de la Casa de Rocabertí, ms. in the Biblioteca del Palau de Peralada). D. Francesch de Montcada, Marquis of Aytona, won acclaim for his Sallustian Expedición de los Catalanes of 1623. Diego Montfar i Sorts, an honored citizen of Barcelona and author of numerous works on Catalan history, owned a personal library of over one thousand books: B.N./Ms. 9342, Oratio Cujus  Auctor fuit Salvator Bofill Rhetoricae Barcinonae Cathedraticus (1612), 10r. Pujades, the official chronicler of the Principality, edited the first part of his chronicle of Catalonia in 1609. Interestingly, the  few owners of historical books found in Carme Batlle's survey of fifteenth-century Barcelona libraries were almost all members of the urban elite (Batlle, Bibliotecas").

5. Zulueta, Don Antonio Agustín; Caiga, De Catalonia; San Clemente (Sant Climent),Correspondencia Inédita; and the entries in the Gran Enciclopedia Catalana under these names.

6. Candide, Chapter 25. One is reminded of Casanova's ironic aside: "I also met at Gorice a Count Coronimi, who  was known in learned circles as the author of some Latin treatises on diplomacy. Nobody read his books, but everyone agreed he was a very learned man" (Memoirs, VI, 576).