IN APRIL 1981 some forty Hispanist scholars gathered at UCLA from the far corners of the country, as well as from Canada and abroad, to celebrate the seventh centennial of two great monarchs. The year was approximately a halfway mark between their respective death dates--James the Conqueror in 1276 and Alfonso the Learned in 1284. These two were key "founders" of Hispanic culture and made unique contributions to Western civilization. To this day the two kings symbolize for their respective peoples the national spirit and aspirations. As friends, rivals, and in-laws, both men were as frequently at each other's throat as at each other's side. Neither is well known to Americans, imprisoned as we are in a nineteenth-century historiography, which centers on the remoter lands of medieval northern Europe and which scarcely notices the Mediterranean heartlands. The UCLA symposium proposed to focus attention on these neglected giants and their societies.

Promoted by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and sponsored by the university's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the three-day bilingual interchange was also designed as a public event, attracting a large and enthusiastic general audience. Beneath its scholarly and general purposes, however, lurked a third, ulterior motive. It has been obvious for many years that the steadiest growing discipline in the humanities in American colleges and universities is medieval studies. ⁽¹⁾ Within that burgeoning field, Spanish medieval history is experiencing a renaissance, with an ever-increasing volume of practitioners and publications, and with a correspondingly widening audience. This renaissance has been marked recently by the establishment and flourish- [xvi] -ing of two national societies, the Academy of Research Historians on Medieval Spain (an affiliate of the American Historical Association) and the North American Catalan Society. The UCLA symposium marked a coming of age for this Spanish field, and simultaneously promoted its further development, by presenting representative historians from that growing circle whose publications have attracted international attention.

Study of the two kings offered a suitable stage to display those representatives, a topic ample but reasonably focused; by the same token, unhappily, the kings excluded many of the best historians of medieval Spain, whose own specialties lay before or after the time span or else had a different emphasis. Financial limits on the conference, and the myriad conflicting obligations of academe, effectively excluded others. The impressive cast of scholars finally selected was asked to display materials and directions characterizing this young field, both by overview and by new contributions, accessible not only to Hispanists but to other medievalists and even to some more general groups. Since this small book can offer only a sampling from the conference, it concentrates on the historical-political, with some framework of letters, finance, and especially law. It resolutely excludes papers on art, the Muslim and Jewish contribution to Spanish culture, and especially the broader fields of language and letters. Medieval Castilian literature is already well served in publications, while art and music are not neglected. Consequently such contributors as John Boswell (interethnic relations), Lloyd Kasten (Alfonso's language), John Keller (manuscript illumination), Edward Maeder (costume), Norman Roth (Jewish translators of Alfonso), and Larry Simon (castles) do not appear here. ⁽²⁾ An introductory chapter will supply some sense of that broader background. It will also explain how our celebration of two kings can function as an analysis of two [xvii] divergent models of society, not exclusive but variously mixed and balanced.

As for procedural minutiae, toponyms are given in Castilian, since maps and reference works usually present them so; exceptions are those places for which an English form is common (as with Cordova, Seville, and the variant Zaragoza). Names of persons may be Catalan or Castilian, as seems appropriate to each case. Kings of the realms of Aragon are not confined to the Catalan, Aragonese, Occitan, or Castilian versions, any of which would be offensive to modern clients of another of the tongues, but are simply put into a transcending English. Thus one of our protagonists is neither Jaime or Jaume or Jacme but James; his father and his son are neither Pere or Pedro or Pero but Peter. Since James's son, King Peter of Aragon, is simultaneously Peter I of Valencia, II of Catalonia, and III of Aragon, he will be known here simply by his identifying sobriquet "the Great." Such standard nicknames will identify other kings of the realms of Aragon, with one exception. The author of chapter 2, with that originality our symposium exemplifies and encourages, has resolutely set his face against the nomenclature Alfonso "the Troubadour" and Peter "the Catholic," as an unwarranted usage. Each king throughout that chapter will therefore appear only with chaste numbers (in the Aragonese rather than the Catalan sequence) as Alfonso II and Peter II. Castilian royalty, not suffering the multilingual confusion of its neighbors, will keep Castilian names. Fortunately Alfonso is as acceptably English as it is Castilian; Alphonse here will signal a French context, Afonso a Portuguese. The term Aragon is confusing, since it can mean the upland or hinterland kingdom of that name, whence James derived his main royal title, or else the entire complex of kingdoms, counties (especially Catalonia), and lordships (such as Montpellier). The complex itself is commonly called the Crown of Aragon, or less ambiguously the realms of Aragon, though simple Aragon and Aragonese can also serve. Cortes for the protoparliament and infante for prince are adopted into English, as is commonly done now.

The book has been conceived and edited as a structural [xviii] whole, despite the inevitable disjunctions as each scholar probes his own area. The interrelated nature of the offerings might have allowed differing sequences of the chapters. The present order hopes to maintain a tension of themes and also of historiographic approaches, to sustain a comparative focus on the two kingdoms by alternating our chapters on each, and finally to have a care for a lively variety to hold the reader's interest through this challenging play of scholarship. To mesh the whole, besides introductory and closing essays, I have provided chronological tables, a bibliographical note, and paragraphs or sections of linkage for easier transition between some chapters.

Enterprises such as this symposium and its book are the work of many hands. Fredi Chiappelli, director of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, devoted his considerable expertise and experience to their success. Among the Center's staff Clorinda Donato and Carol Horak as project coordinators deserve special notice. Carol Lanham as senior editor for the Center's publications oversaw earlier processing of the manuscript; at Princeton University Press, Joanna Hitchcock guided it through the later phases, with valuable suggestions and improvements. John Moniz, S.J., made a strong editorial contribution. Paul Padilla and Larry Simon labored generously in an editorial-secretarial capacity. The secretarial staff of the UCLA Department of History typed and retyped the manuscript. The UCLA Department of Music lent its facilities and presented a musical program for the conference; and the university's Research Library, particularly through Edward Shreeves, offered concomitant exhibits, with the cooperation of the Institute of Medieval Mediterranean Spain. Dean Philip Levine gave active support, as did the faculty of the Department of Spanish.

Among symposiasts from abroad, four merit particular thanks for their strong support: Jesús Lalinde Abadía of the University of Zaragoza, Charles Emmanuel Dufourcq of the University of Paris, Emilio Sáez of the University of Madrid and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, and Federico Udina Martorell, director of the Arxiu de la Corona [xix] d'Aragó at Barcelona (now Honorary Director in residence). Pressure of affairs has unfortunately delayed and thus excluded the papers of Professors Sáez and Udina, while Professor Dufourcq's untimely death has had the same effect.

The conference was financed as a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities, supplemented by a very generous grant from the Ahmanson Foundation. Subsidiary grants came from the Del Amo Foundation, and from the Spanish government through the good offices of the consul general, José Manuel Paz, who added both his formal sponsorship and personal participation. Editorial processes were facilitated by a second Del Amo grant, while actual publication has been subsidized by the treaty fund of the U.S.-Spanish Joint Committee for Educational and Cultural Affairs (Comité Conjunto Hispano-Norteamericano).

ROBERT I. BURNS, S. J.
University of California, Los Angeles
 

2. Fordham University Press will publish a selection of the Alfonsine "cultural" papers as an issue of its quarterly Thought, projected for Fall 1985, under the title Alfonso the Learned: Emperor of Culture.