LITMIR.BIZ

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figures who had to seek out the Cortes and displace themselves, regardless of where they may be held, to participate in them. Through this act of displacement, the city procuradores provided both their physical and documental body to the court process, the latter represented by the cuaderno of petitions that expressed their voice within the Cortes.

      In the case of the Cuaderno de la Hermandad, its presenters were the procuradores of the city of Burgos, who wished to have their petitions sewn into the ordenamiento produced on the occasion of the Cortes so that these petitions might be granted and validated. It is in this act of binding these cuadernos together that sovereignty manifests itself in the space of the court.

      Thus, every petitioning group had to displace itself to reach the site of the court, abandoning its own physical space or urbs. Within the lexicon of medicine, heterotopia is the displacement of an organ or part of an organ with respect to its normal location in the human body. It is exactly this process that the royal courts imposed: the organs had to abandon their functional niches to seek the place where sovereignty was exercised.

      It is here that the Hermandad of 1315 showed itself to be quite original, functioning as a kind of medicine for the circumstance. The Hermandad was a civitas, a civil and political entity that effectively overcame the problem of displacement through the creation of a horizontal network that occupied as much geographic space as possible. In the textual analysis I will show how this space came to be occupied, and how the Hermandad expanded to create a network of urban centers. If a heterotopic entity is, according to Foucault’s metaphor, a ship adrift in the middle of the ocean (“Des espaces autres”), the Hermandad constituted a veritable fleet.

      The functioning of this fleet was based on strategies of chivalric solidarity. Its originality resided in the fact that the proposal that the Hermandad carried to the royal courts did not define any internal hierarchy: it designated neither a master nor any other type of vertical structure. The displacement that it sought was the moment in which the contract was validated through the incorporation of the signatures of the regency council, which had convened the court, and it was sewn into the resulting ordenamiento. In some way, these strategies of chivalric solidarity enter the space of sovereignty yet remain, at the same time, outside of it. The relationship of exteriority preserves the meaning of the Hermandad, but it is also one of the reasons for its fungibility.

      The manner in which the chivalric civitas operated outside of the vertical hierarchy while seeking to participate in the space of sovereignty had relevant consequences. Perhaps the first and most important of these was the search for a way to speak about chivalry that was different from that which tended to be used in monarchical discourse; in this search, chivalry aimed to abandon its condition as an object of regulation to elaborate on its own conditions of possibility, its own rules, its own and subjective system of control (Rodríguez-Velasco, El debate). The voices of the knights themselves, for example, whether nobles or of bourgeois extraction, seem to have wanted to explore this possibility.

      One could try to explore, in fact, a poetics of chivalric order just as it was practiced in the realm of the urban knights, independently of its links to nobility, and exploring its political ties based on the idea of fraternity. The poetics of knightly fraternity are very closely related to the poetics of fraternity in the scope of bourgeois alliances of the Middle Ages and the societies of protection and mutual assistance.

      The majority of the bourgeois organizations, with the exception of the societates militum previously mentioned, were constituted as fraternities, confraternities, or chapters of artisanal or trade guilds. The definition of these groups by Antonello Mattone is perfect: “a universitas, an association of individuals with the same statutes, the same rules, the same saints, the same aid organization” (“Corporazioni, gremi e artigianato,” 21). In almost all European cities—throughout the kingdoms of France, the Italian domains, the Holy Roman Empire, Flanders in particular, and elsewhere—the guilds consolidate a large part of municipal activity and organize the urban space around them effectively.¹³

      In cities like Bologna or Naples, as well as in others such as the Castilian city of Ávila, the gremial and artisanal fraternities form their statutes based on their interaction with the ecclesiastical centers of power, be they the cathedral chapter or the neighborhood parishes. The Bolognese confraternities of Santa Maria della Vita and of Santa Maria della Morte, founded respectively in 1260 and 1336, received their statutes either from the parish church or from a Dominican convent, because of the preaching of Venturino of Bergamo (Fanti, Confraternite e città, 1–60; 61–173). In the city of Naples, during the times of Charles of Anjou (1266–1285) and Charles II (1285–1309) and then during the Aragonese period at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the gremial and artisanal guilds, like that of Santa Marta, also presumed a reorganization of the urban space in function of the processional ceremonies of the different times of the year or of certain happenings related to the guild itself. The statutes and the processional system were based on ecclesiastical rites (Vitolo and Di Meglio, Napoli angioino-aragonese, 147–209). The entire organizing process of these guilds was dependent on the religious and liturgical calendar and submitted to it as a political form of theological organization. In the city of Ávila, for example, the Chapter of San Benito was organized as a fraternity in which the artisanal and guild bourgeoisie established direct relations with the cathedral chapter and with the three Benedictine reformist groups (the Cluniacs, the Cistercians, and the Premonstratensians); their statutes and related documentation were handled by the ecclesiastical entities (Sobrino Chomón, Documentos and Documentación medieval).

      It would be misguided to argue that these congregations lacked any political element. The Italian guilds and some of the confraternities founded in the city of Seville, for example, had so much political force by the end of the fifteenth century that they ended up being dominated by sectors of the nobility that needed to assert their political presence during the development of the city. The most striking aspect of such fraternities is that their poetics are clearly linked with political theology; they composed their statutes with ecclesiastical rigor and rhetoric, employing church calendars and adopting the ecclesiastical organization of time, its hierarchical vocabulary, and, in the end, its doctrine.

      The organizations of lay knights were radically separated from the dominant form of bourgeois association. They expressed their political will through textual strategies and apparatuses that passed for chivalric discourse, for juridical ethics and discourse, as well as urbanism and the practice of the urban space. These fraternities should be understood as a desperate search to construct a voice, and the documental modes of articulating this voice, to submit it to the juridico-political space of the courts.

      The bibliography on knightly fraternities in Castile is sufficiently abundant, beginning with the older works of Julio Puyol y Alonso, and then later the various analyses of C. González Mínguez, Antonio Álvarez de Morales, Julio Valdeón Baruque, Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, and Manuel Fernando Ladero (above all regarding the fifteenth-century Hermandad).¹⁴ On the other hand, these were not the only social movements of bourgeois confraternity. The different fraternal movements that arose in the middle and the end of the fifteenth century, such as Galician irmandiños and Levantine germanías, all accompany a process of vindication that some have considered revolutionary. All of them, like the previous groups mentioned, are founded in a semantics of fraternity that promises to yield significant analytical fruit.

      As Eloy Benito Ruano and Álvarez de Morales have pointed out, the denominations of fraternity are as nonspecific and unsystematic as many other terms found in medieval sources. Their meaning depends on context for the construction of discourse. The term hermandad subsumes many diverse alliances that may lack any common link, thereby setting in motion a series of semantic resources that tended to localize the corporation itself. Brotherhood, fraternity, confraternity—hermandad, cofradía, confraternidad—all these nouns point to the same roots, frater and germanus, wherein a horizontal relationship is manifested. The semantics of fraternity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries cannot be addressed (even by the members themselves) without acknowledging its significance within horizontal associative medieval systems. The fratres of medieval institutions configure spaces in which this horizontality

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