IMC 2017: Sessions

This session explores contours of lordship in Christian Iberia during the 10th and 11th centuries. Lucy Pick argues that the significance of the relics of Saint Pelayo is best understood through exploration the factional politics of 10th-century Galicia, particularly in rivalries between local noble families and between branches of the Asturo-Leonese royal family. She focuses on Abbess Gontroda Gutiérrez and her relationship with daughters of the royal house. Rob Portass examines aristocratic rivalries in Galicia, asking whether the portrayal of these rivalries in charter evidence reveals something about the strategies that aristocrats used in order to establish primacy over rivals. This paper considers whether the recording of episodes and anecdotes of rivalry, discord, and violence was primarily designed not to memorialise family, humiliate foes, and exalt patrons, but rather to address a more mundane concern: namely, to allow individuals and families to set a public seal on their written claims to title - in spite of the essentially private nature of such disputes - in what was, after all, a densely proprietorial society. Jeff Bowman draws attention to the participation of elite women in the management of castles. In Catalonia and elsewhere, lordship was one of the key features of political order and the control of castles became one of the defining features of lordship. The particular richness of the surviving evidence from Catalonia - from simple records of sale to complex convenientiae - allows us to trace the sinews of power with more precision than we might in other parts of contemporary Europe. This evidence affords vivid glimpses of countesses, viscountess, and women of the castellan class controlling these vital political, economic, and military resources in collaboration and in competition with their husbands, brothers, and sons.