Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages

by Jesús D. Rodríguez-Velasco

Overview

An exploration of the thirteenth-century law code known as Siete Partidas

Conceived and promulgated by Alfonso X, King of Castile and León (r. 1252-1282), and created by a workshop of lawyers, legal scholars, and others, the set of books known as the Siete Partidas is both a work of legal theory and a legislative document designed to offer practical guidelines for the rendering of legal decisions and the management of good governance. Yet for all its practical reach, which extended over centuries and as far as the Spanish New World, it is an unusual text, argues Jesús R. Velasco, one that introduces canon and ecclesiastical law in the vernacular for explicitly secular purposes, that embraces intellectual disciplines and fictional techniques that normally lie outside legal science, and that cultivates rather than shuns perplexity.

In Dead Voice, Velasco analyzes the process of the Siete Partidas's codification and the ways in which different cultural, religious, and legal traditions that existed on the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages were combined in its innovative construction. In particular, he pays special attention to the concept of "dead voice," the art of writing the law in the vernacular of its clients as well as in the language of legal professionals. He offers an integrated reading of the Siete Partidas, exploring such matters as the production, transmission, and control of the material text; the collaboration between sovereignty and jurisdiction to define the environment where law applies; a rare legislation of friendship; and the use of legislation to characterize the people as "the soul of the kingdom," endowed with the responsibility of judging the stability of the political space.

Presenting case studies beyond the Siete Partidas that demonstrate the incorporation of philosophical and fictional elements in the construction of law, Velasco reveals the legal processes that configured novel definitions of a subject and a people.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812251869
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	01/24/2020
Series:	The Middle Ages Series
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jesus R. Velasco has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and Yale Universityand is author of Order and Chivalry: Knighthood and Citizenship in Late Medieval Castile, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

This book is an investigation into the methods, decisions, and theoretical perspectives that underpin the creation and writing of an all-encompassing legal code, the Siete Partidas (Seven Parts), although it is not an exhaustive study of that code. It is, rather, an examination of some of the code's technologies and techniques of codification. In that sense, it opens up a larger conversation with the theories and techniques of legal codification in other languages and cultures during the Middle Ages and beyond. Ultimately, this book is a study of the question of what it meant to codify law in the Middle Ages and what problems this question gave birth to, along with the technical strategies that lawgivers and law scholars offered to resolve those issues.

These techniques and theories of codification fall under the notion that gives the title to this book, dead voice. As we will see in more depth in Chapter 1, "dead voice" is an expression used by many theologians and lawyers during the long Middle Ages and was introduced by Alfonso himself into the text of the Third Partida, Prologue 18. The expression (vox mortua, in Latin) may refer to many different aspects of legal writing, and it is always set in opposition to some sort of oral witnessing, or living voice—a kind of oral witnessing that seems to have appeared during the first or second century of the Common Era. Procedural lawyers and law scholars used vox mortua to refer to written instruments, and Alfonso enhanced it in a way that I find particularly productive. As I will argue in this book, this enhanced concept of dead voice as a means of regulating legal writing at both the normative and the documentary levels will give us access to larger issues in the process of legal codification. For instance, this legal codification productively utilizes fictional devices, establishes legal temporalities, gives birth to a specific form of legal subject, and includes a legal rationality based on philosophical corpora. Dead voice is the gravitational center and the general name I give to some of those techniques and theories of codification.

One could think of the Siete Partidas as a constitutional code that was intended to present a theory of power and the rules according to which all other rules must arise. Alfonso inscribed this theory of power in and as the legal system itself, so that legislation, codification, and power theory cannot be separated from one another. The code also includes a full set of laws of all the branches of ecclesiastic and secular legislations, both public and private. In that sense, it is a code that mainly contains canon, administrative, procedural, civil, and penal law and legislates across these legal divides. As part of its legislative impulse, it also regulates its own legal science—its philosophy and theory of law. Again, these theoretical elements are part of both the legal text and the act of codification. Such complex codification required an innovative architecture.

The main characteristic of such architecture was a technical tour de force—that is, in its use of the vernacular. The Siete Partidas appeared in a world in which vernacular legal writing was chiefly reserved for local regulations, whereas legal science and codification normally ran in transpolitical (that is, crossing different polities), arguably universal, languages (Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic). The legislator decided to code the law in a vernacular whose legal vocabulary and systems of expression were technically limited. Only certain kinds of legal objects had been previously articulated by this vernacular legal language, including private acts taking place in relatively Latinate vernacular expressions. Across the Iberian Peninsula, some fueros, or local regulations, as well as charters regarding the foundation or population of a town or city (cartas pueblas), customary law in Castile and Aragon, legal responses, or even the proceedings of cortes (the itinerant meetings between the king or the regent and the other orders of society) were indeed published in the vernacular from the late twelfth century onward. Likewise, the important compilation of Visigothic law known as the Liber Iudicium, or Lex Visigothorum, was translated during the first third of the thirteenth century under the rule of Fernando III (r. 1217-1252) as the Fuero Juzgo. The vernacular royal chancery started during the kingdom of Alfonso VIII (r. 1158-1214), to bloom only during the kingdom of Alfonso X (r. 1252-1282).

Despite its vernacular articulation and unlike the local examples given above, and also contrary to the idea that some scholars of Roman law, including Manlio Bellomo, have entertained, the Siete Partidas was not intended to be a document of local legal significance but rather one that would inaugurate a new kind of universalization—and therefore a new thesis on transpolitical empire. The Siete Partidas, indeed, were born in the juncture of three extremely important events: the beginning and end of Alfonso's imperial ambitions and the administration of new territories and political entities after the conquests of Muslim independent cities and kingdoms (ṭawāʾif, or taifas) in the south of the peninsula and across the region known as Sharq Al-Andalus, which encompassed the Iberian eastern Muslim domains.

With the purpose of providing this new kind of universalization, the legal vernacular needed to constitute its own technology of codification, which is a central component of dead voice, or legal writing. This technology entailed developing a systematic legal lexicography as a part of the codification process, and this legal lexicography pervades the whole code. It is a lexicography that could not merely be based on translation from the other more universal languages but instead needed to provide a new conceptual map with its own order and structure, and its own material representation. While the definitions of concepts in the Partidas mention their Latin, Greek, Arabic, or Hebrew genealogy or etymology, the codification always leads toward a vernacular updating of the legal concept, not a direct usage of the original one.

The rewards of researching the technologies of legal codification are various. First and foremost, this research allows us to delve into emerging theories of constitutional power. In other words, it allows us to understand how the process of creation of the legal mainframe set the heuristic and hermeneutic borderlines of legislation and codification: how the legal conceptual map shaped the liminal vocabulary for creating and interpreting the theory of power itself. Accordingly, such a theory of power with constitutional value will configure both the autonomy of the legal discipline it elicits and the rules of creation and interpretation that operate in the world interior to such a discipline. This is important insofar as we can see how the entire set of theories and techniques encompassed by the constitutional impulse become difficult to separate from the very legal discipline; in other words, they feed each other, they support each other.

In addition, we can study the ways in which facts, actions, and subjects, both actual and potential, become legal matter. Indeed, this is important for understanding the pervasive process of juridification of the world—how every single experience becomes susceptible to being narrated and interpreted according to juridical models and languages. We can study the processes whereby the law (both its constitutional value and the legal discipline) either appropriates or colonizes the other disciplines and bodies of knowledge.

The juridification of the world, however pervasive it is, cannot work solely by means of juridical logic and legal rationality. The process of codification I am studying here is important because it also codifies affective and emotional regimes of the legal subject and their own constitutional value. As I will argue in this book, with support from primary sources, the constitutional value of affects and emotions implies a whole legal theory and a set of techniques to convey to the legal clients that the law is their own public responsibility, that they are bound not only by the knowledge of its existence and the understanding of its text but also, and primarily, by their ability to feel with it, to describe the world according to the language of the law and with its epistemological regulations—namely, how to perceive through the senses as they are regulated in the law itself. This is what makes the law really meaningful to the people: that the people are responsible for an aesthetic (perceptive, cognitive, judging) participation and collaboration with the law.

In this sense, the juridification of the world by means of this affective, emotional, and, in summary, aesthetic regime also configures a specific legal subject. Part of my project delves into the characteristics of this specific legal subject and examines how this process of subjectivization entails a specific concept of empirical sovereignty (in a context in which sovereignty is always thought to be outside empirical realizations, as Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner, among others, have studied) and legal thinking. Empirical sovereignty implies a concrete set of techniques for perceiving and conceiving of the center of jurisdictional power on the part of the legal subject. Legal thinking implies the necessary abilities to interpret the world with the tools provided by legal vocabularies, legal materialities, and legal gestures.

We are looking at a legislative drive that shapes the semantic and pragmatic, as much as cognitive and empirical, senses with the purpose of building what we can call legal sensibility. This is the affective regime that emerges from this process of codification. In other words, the lawgiver is also interested in legislating how, under what conditions, and to what extent the client of the law (the "people," as the legislator defines the whole community of legal subjects in Partidas 2.10) must feel and be affected by the law.

The techniques and theories of law codification include the creation of sensible legal devices that are part of the very legislation—the material conditions in which legal objects are given form, presented, submitted, and so forth—in order to have legal force. These legal devices challenge our regular conceptions of the material text. They are material in the sense that the process of codification explores the material conditions of the production of text as a weaving together of many different elements expressing epistemological collaboration. Such material forms may include text, cords, seals, images, and the different writing materials (whether paper or parchment, color, etc.) All the elements within these sensible legal devices must be interpreted and studied as bearing legal value, not as mere accessories to the legal text. This sort of material text—what I call here sensible legal devices—is also the result of processes of appropriation of disciplines external to the law but ones performed within the legal discipline—history, philosophy, biblical knowledge, and so forth. The legal material text is, indeed, a legal epistemological device.

As will be argued in this book, this way of appropriation of nonlegal disciplines by the legal science is central to the techniques and theories of legal codification performed in the Siete Partidas and is only understandable within a much larger discussion about the autonomy of law that had been taking place in the Mediterranean basin since the eleventh century, with some of the most important expression coming from the Iberian Peninsula between the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. The techniques and theories of codification elicited by this debate, which I will conceptualize as the debate on perplexing legislation, will lead us to conclude that Alfonso's codification participates in this debate by embracing its challenges and including all those external disciplines as part of the legislative impulse.

The Law-Scratchers

Let us imagine the following hypothetical situation. Written laws and legal documents fall in the lap of different individuals or organized groups. These powerful individuals or groups are not necessarily lawyers themselves, nor are they necessarily in the legal profession. They claim to be part of "the people" in general: regular clients of the law from varied social and economic origins. As such, they are concerned about the law and about the way it applies to them—for, indeed, law is not just the concern of professional lawyers but affects everyone. These people also feel that they have a say in the production of the law. Some even think that they may have the right actually to evaluate the law and, eventually, have it changed or change it by themselves, because while the law is a monopoly of the systems of government, the people themselves are an essential part of government given the social, political, and economic role they play in public and private life.

In this hypothetical situation, they then proceed to read the laws and the documents, and they do the following: they erase the parts they don't like, mostly those that interfere with their individual or collective idea of sovereignty; and after erasing the words, sentences, laws, and documents, they rewrite the law, replacing the parts they did not like with ones that they consider more adequate, that is, more advantageous to them.

The hypothetical situation I have just described is not hypothetical at all and has happened not only once, but many times. Perhaps it is, in fact, an ongoing situation, so much so, that the legal text has become an active and metamorphic object in which the law is not necessarily considered a durable code but a process, a series of drafts and palimpsests.

Indeed, a more condensed and objectively referential narrative of similar behaviors was recorded in the opening passages of some of the early manuscripts of the Siete Partidas as authored by King Alfonso X of Castile and León during the second half of the thirteenth century. Early redactions—that is, the first version or manuscript editions of the Partidas—decry that some people (he calls them gentes, which is different than pueblo, or "people") in his domains (señorío, which also means "the king's jurisdiction") used to unlawfully scrape away the laws they found to be inconvenient for them: "Las gentes [the people in our domains, in a nontechnical way] used to scratch [the manuscript containing the laws] and write on top of them that which was profitable to them at the cost of harming los pueblos [the people as legal subjects], taking the power and privileges of the kings and appropriating these for themselves, which should have never been done." The scratched "laws" Alfonso refers to were legal documents, fueros, local charters, regulations, and privilegios (what I always translate as "privilege," according to Scott's translation of Partidas 3.18.2) predating his legislative impulse and his kingdom—that is, the legal labyrinth that he, as a king, was bound to inherit. Those laws were mostly written on parchment, and Alfonso was probably conveying the image of hypothetical, unnamed persons literally canceling words or more extensive sections of text with the help of a scraper. Although neither an inexpensive nor widely available material, parchment is not difficult to restore, and recycling writing materials is an old and common practice—the one that gave birth to the concept of palimpsest. Probably using a solution high in calcium to refill the wounds inflicted with the scraper, these opportunistic law-scratchers restored the parchments they were using before rewriting something else on top of them.

Furthermore, the parchments on which the laws were written had other nontextual elements like hanging devices and jurisgraphisms—graphic elements with juridical value. These nontextual elements could also be affected by the intervention of the law-scratchers. Some—such as seals and cords, or certain designs including the wheel (a graphic device consisting of a chi-ro chrismon) of the privilegio rodado (wheeled privilege), or certain kinds of crosses—were intended to bear witness to the authenticity of the legal object and invest it with a sacred quality. Other elements, including miniatures, are more difficult to interpret in their relationship to the law but are still central to the process of codification, legal writing, and dissemination of the legal object.

Scratching and rewriting the law involved different kinds of intervention with and modification—or falsification—of the legal object. Michel Foucault's reinterpretation of the notion of illegalism is helpful in understanding these. In the absence of a stable regulation of the materiality of legal communication, the clients of the law have a larger area of movement where their activities are neither legal nor illegal, and they can create habits, customs, or ways of doing things; these illegalisms, which were exploited by even the highest powers (as we will see even with Alfonso himself), are extremely productive and can be used in writing legislation that will turn illegalism into illegality. This raises two questions. The first is, what is the meaning of the integrity of the legal object? The second is whether such integrity constitutes a necessary condition for the constitution of monarchical jurisdiction and sovereignty. In other words, the main questions at stake are these: Where is the sovereignty and jurisdiction located? and What is its relationship with the very materiality of the legal object, its codification, and its dissemination and preservation? These questions are central to understanding the regulation of what we call in this book dead voice—that is, the techniques of legal writing and models of material codification of the law.

The short law-scratcher narrative we presented before connects the modification of the materiality of the legal object with the undermining of monarchical power. The narrative appears in the first redaction of Alfonso's Siete Partidas and can be found in the prologue to the legal code preceding the Partidas proper, known as the Espéculo, or more fully as Espéculo de las Leyes (Mirror of Laws). It is difficult to know the point at which the law-scratcher narrative was exchanged for a different one that appears in later editions of the Partidas. If we accept Alfonso's chronology of the Partidas, the project was finished in 1265. The text, however, was revised and corrected several times after that date, probably as late as the 1270s. It is not impossible that editions after 1265 had already dispensed with this narrative of the law-scratchers in order to include a different one.

In the new version, which would accompany the Partidas from around 1270 onward, the people in the king's jurisdiction were no longer referred to as law-scratching subjects who undermined the monarchical right to a central jurisdiction. Instead, they were presented in the new prologue to the Partidas as "big hearted" and "loyal; and therefore, it is necessary that loyalty be kept with truth, and strength with right, and with justice."

One of the codices containing the narrative about the law-scratchers, now preserved at the British Library, is the only manuscript that can be dated to Alfonsine times. It is also one of the very few manuscripts containing jurisgraphisms. The first set of four illuminations, which I have analyzed elsewhere, are powerful visual concepts centered on the monarchy as the source of jurisdiction. In them, the king is the ultimate author and interpreter of the law, even though he seeks confirmation from God directly and without mediation. Alfonso is represented here as the physical origin of jurisdiction and sovereignty, while the other powers of the kingdom occupy their own spaces behind the monarch. Indeed, both the reference to the law-scratchers and the illuminations show the real interests of this legislator—to find ways to establish the origin and the center of the legislative power, and the construction of a central, and concentric, jurisdictional power.

The foremost question is how can this link between codification, the material integrity of the legal object, and the constitution of a central jurisdiction be created? In other words, how can jurisdiction be made visible, tangible, and sensible? How can sovereignty be made empirically present? These are, indeed, questions that leads to another one: how can a legal code be written that can grant the king these juridical and political ambitions while curbing even the possibility of people in his jurisdiction erasing and rewriting the law? In order to do that, I argue that it was necessary to create integrity and autonomy for the legal discipline itself: the precise identification of what is law and what is not, of what has legal form and what does not, of what is legal language and what is not, and, above all, establishing the rules that govern the internal functioning of the law and legal science. Such creation would foreclose the possibility to interpret as law something that lies outside the code and outside the rules for legal creativity that are expressed in such code—which, thus, would have a constitutional value, as a rule of rules. But, how is such autonomous legal science to be created? What are the techniques of law-writing and law-saying necessary for this purpose? Do these techniques also entail techniques of government? Do they entail techniques for the subjects of the law to feel that they must take care of themselves in any particular way? This book advances some answers to this set of questions.

Becoming a Lawgiver

Alfonso X, the king who denounced and intended to ban law-scratching and turn this sort of illegalism (something that has not been considered by the law) into an illegal activity (something that has been considered unlawful by the law), was himself a law-scratcher. One of his first legislative actions took place on March 24, 1253, ten months into his reign. The Master of the Military Order of Calatrava brought to the king's attention that his brother, the infante, or Prince Henry (1230-1303), had deposited in the Calatrava castle two privileges (privilegios) from their father, Fernando III, granting Henry territories around Lebrija and Xeres. Alfonso and Henry's relationship was extremely belligerent, and Alfonso could not accept that their father had given these lands to his brother. Two members of the Calatrava Order had brought the documents to Alfonso's attention while he was in Seville. He acknowledged the receipt of the documents and declared that as soon as he received them, "I tore them up." This is an extreme—if not literal—form of law-scratching.

During the first years of his rule, Alfonso performed as a law-scratcher in different ways. He sometimes destroyed documents; sometimes he confirmed other documents after reviewing them. At times he added a seal to the document submitted to him, while other times he did not. And on a number of occasions, he simply left in a state of historical latency documents and legal claims inherited or put in his hands from different archives across his growing kingdom. All those confirmed and altered documents, the ones I call revenant manuscripts in Chapter 3, constitute the very first legal concerns and experiences of the king. They are the ones that turned the law-scratcher into a lawgiver—a legislator.

Becoming a legislator implied, for Alfonso, becoming what we can call, a fonction législateur, or a mens (Latin for mind)—that is, giving a single, personal, proper name to a larger and more complex workshop composed of many individuals. The workshop included an undefined number of authors, compilers, translators, textual specialists, scientists, and other intellectuals and scholars from many different cultural backgrounds, languages, and faiths, all working together to build the intellectual, scientific, and scholarly immensity of the Alfonsine Era. Therefore, when we say "Alfonso" we are referring, indeed, to the function, to the mens, and to the escuela, or workshop. But we are also saying something bigger than that. It is well known that each of the Siete Partidas begins with one of the letters of the king's name, and that, therefore, the name is the acronym, a heptagrammaton that gives rise to the code itself and everything it stands for. Everything comes back to the name, to the individual, and from him, to the era itself, to the periodizations and temporalities of which Alfonso is, as well, the heptagrammaton.

Apart from other shorter or more circumstantial pieces of legislation, four major legal codes can be attributed to Alfonso: the Fuero Real, the Espéculo, the Siete Partidas, and the Setenario. It is possible to argue that the last three are, in fact, the same project—although they reveal the complexities inherent in the process of construction of the legislative code, the processes of perfection and change.

The chronology of these codifications is still difficult to ascertain with any certainty. There is some consensus among scholars, however, that the Fuero Real, the first legal corpus, was completed before 1255, when it was probably given to the city of Aguilar de Campoo. 1254 may very well be the year of the general edition, with its broader establishment in 1256, continuing more or less uninterruptedly until 1272, the year of the crisis between the king and the increasingly powerful cities. We measure the establishment of the Fuero Real by the number of cities to which it was granted as a legal code. The implementation of the Fuero Real, however, continued afterward, well beyond Alfonso's time, often as a legal and political bargaining chip with cities, brotherhoods, or other political entities. Indeed, the Fuero was put second in the hierarchy of legal sources in the Ordenamiento de Alcalá of 1348, coming right after the Ordenamiento itself.

The Espéculo which was referred to as an existing legal body in the proceedings of the Cortes of Zamora celebrated in 1274, seems to have been promulgated in May 1255, according to the excellent analysis provided by Jerry Craddock. Many scholars agree that the Espéculo is a first attempt at the construction of a central body of monarchical legislation and that, as González Jiménez points out, "most of its materials would end up being recast and integrated in the Partidas." However, the differences between the Espéculo and the Partidas are profound, and they cannot be explained by only considering the Espéculo as a tentative work, an unfinished first try. There are, for example, key political differences in the way they regulate the social order of the kingdom, and the codifying techniques of the Espéculo are not as theoretically inflected as those of the Partidas.

Scholars of the Siete Partidas seem to agree that the latter code had an imperial motivation. The Partidas were conceptualized as the Alfonsine legal initiative after the embassy from the Republic of Pisa visited Alfonso in March 1256 and asked him to submit his candidacy for the vacant office of emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. The chronology presented by the Partidas themselves seems to be reasonable. The technical works of Jerry Craddock and Aquilino Iglesia Ferreirós yield a clearer panorama of the creation and dates of the different versions of the Partidas. Despite other discussions and the convoluted hypotheses presented by Alfonso García Gallo and some of his disciples, the Partidas would have to have been initiated on June 23, 1256, and finished on August 28, 1265, and whereas it is clear that there are two editions and other revisions, they all pertain to what Iglesia Ferreirós conceived as the internal evolution of the Alfonsine legislative effort.

This chronology is entirely acceptable. But there is a larger chronology of legislative events that also needs to be taken into account. We know the process of establishing the Fuero Real, but for the other works, we mostly have circumstantial evidence or internal references that begin and end in the texts themselves. Considering a larger chronology, it is important to note that the legislative impetus behind Alfonso's work belonged to his father, King Fernando III, who kept alive Alfonso VIII's chancery and its innovations. Fernando III also pushed for the enforcement and ultimate translation of the Liber Iudicium, or Fuero Juzgo in Spanish, from 1243. It is not impossible—actually, quite the contrary—that the search for a monarchical monopoly on legal production was already in the minds of both Alfonso VIII and Fernando III. In this sense, Alfonso presented himself as an epigone rather than a reformer. His epigonism was also a way to honor the towering political legacy of his father, to whom Alfonso refers constantly as if asking for his approval. As Ryan Szpiech has recently suggested, Alfonso, by presenting himself as the father's disciple, begat his father as a historical figure, thus performing at the same time a productive character of the son.

Consensus becomes more tenuous when scholars come to consider the chronology of the Setenario. Some, like Jerry Craddock, Georges Martin, and Gonzalo Martínez Diez, see it as the last and most personal and intimate legislative work of Alfonso's intellectual impulse. According to them, it would have been written in Seville, during the two years of exile preceding Alfonso's death in 1284. In the end, the book would have remained unfinished and sent out into the world before its time. Others, like Fernando Gómez Redondo, consider that the so-called Setenario is nothing other than the first attempt at writing the First Partida. The book had all the defects of an early attempt at codification, and in the end, both the text and its septenary structure would have been reused and subsumed in the Partidas, whose general prologue does praise the count of seven, and turns it into both microcosmic and macrocosmic generative structures.

In my opinion, both positions miss the challenge of reading the chronology of the Setenario. The chronology of the Setenario is, indeed, very difficult to ascertain, but it is obvious that it is in close relationship to the composition of the Partidas. However, I don't think the manuscripts of the Setenario reveal that this is a more personal work, inflected with a certain melancholy, unless from a cavalier and teleological perspective. Perhaps it is; perhaps it was composed in exile—and it probably was, if Craddock's examination of the evidence is correct. However, the interesting thing is that the manuscripts of the Setenario reveal that the project was quite different from the Partidas.

My position is that it is a later work that stems from a completed version of the Partidas and that, drawing on this completed version, proposes a new approach to the law based on an unfinished graphic presentation of the legal conceptual map. Indeed, the manuscripts seem to be drafts that explain to the workshop how to deal with the concepts central to each legal statement, putting those concepts on separate lines and surrounded by a box. This presentation of the draft had the probable purpose of explaining to the artists that these concepts needed to be illuminated, maybe in the way some Jewish manuscripts from the Middle Ages isolate and illuminate central concepts of the Torah or the commentaries. In this sense, the Setenario would be something like a précis or a handbook. As such, it could be interpreted from the vantage point of the techniques of reading, meditation, and study. It would, then, focus the attention on the concepts themselves, and if the boxes in the draft manuscript indicate the intended positions of miniatures, perhaps it also focused on visual, even if abstract, concepts.

What this chronology reveals, regardless of its exactness, is that the legislative momentum began for Alfonso some time around 1254, that is, during the complex process of the repopulation of Seville and other territories conquered from Al-Andalus in the south and the Levantine coast of the Iberian Peninsula (Sharq Al-Andalus), a process that spawned a very large flow of documentation, including the establishment of local charters and jurisdictional competences. This process of repopulation required changes in toponymy and in the very organization and subdivision of space, as well as a full inventory of properties, buildings, and, among other things, crops, trees, and vineyards. The repopulation and redistribution of lands initiated, as well, a jurisdictional reorganization; for example, on November 25, 1253, the city of Carmona was put under the local charter of Seville and the alcaldes de alzada, the judges who can constitute a court of appeals. The very document granting this royal provision explains that they are following the example of Talavera, which was put under the local charter of Toledo's jurisdiction.

If this legislative impulse began in 1254, it was largely finished in 1265, a bit over ten years later. It would have coincided with one of the most creative periods in the Alfonsine workshops. The invention of new legal codifications happened at the same time as the workshops were compiling, critiquing, and translating Arabic texts, by which means they were culturally suturing the newly conquered territories to the rest of the expanding kingdom.

During those long ten years, the legal workshop undertook two completely different tasks, including, on the one hand, the creation of a very effective, metabolic municipal code, the Fuero Real—"metabolic" because of its capacity to change each time it was instated in a different city. Changes entailed the combination of iura propria, such as customs of local charters and privileges from those localities, with the monarchical normative principles and the centrality of the jurisdictional idea with which it had been conceived. The Fuero Real was an extraordinary tool for negotiations between local powers with jurisdictional privileges and the central, growing monarchical government. The timeline of Fuero Real enactments exceeds the biological life of Alfonso X, extending well into the fourteenth century. With the Fuero's wide dissemination, the later Alfonsine workshop, as well as the king's successor, Sancho IV, prepared a companion piece to interpret the laws from this code—a companion known as the Leyes del estilo.

On the other hand, and at a much slower pace and with much less contemporaneous impact—but with a very durable influence in legal thought throughout the Alfonsine Era and beyond—the workshop undertook the task of composing the sequence Espéculo-Siete Partidas-Setenario. Although there is no direct evidence for this, my hypothesis is that a separate workshop of miniaturists and artists was working on the manuscript of an already outdated first version of the First Partida, usually called Libro del Fuero de las Leyes and now preserved in the British Library. The work's being already in progress could explain that the resulting codex can be dated to a time when there were already new versions of the Partidas in circulation.

During these ten years, Alfonso became a lawgiver. This conversion from law-scratcher to lawgiver is hard to perceive in all its importance without debunking the idea of the Siete Partidas as a summa or encyclopedia not entirely focused on legislation. Throughout this book I hold that the Partidas are, from start to finish, a code of legislation—one that includes not only real rights, obligations, norms, and other legal actions but also its own legal science, its own rules of production, interpretation, dissemination, and permanence. Indeed, becoming a lawgiver implied, for Alfonso, the deployment of techniques of legislation and codification that would foster his ambition of a central jurisdiction and a central and exclusive legal code that had all the necessary elements to be received and acknowledged.

Indeed, becoming a lawgiver in Alfonso's case superseded his then-current legislative models: proposing a new legal language and building new ways of constructing the communication of legal materials. He did it at the normative level, as much as at the level of the technologies of documentation, and in both cases not only included the content but also legislated the aesthetics of the legal object. For Alfonso during those ten years of activity, becoming a lawgiver amounted to embracing the productivity of a perplexing technique of legislation in order to universalize the law and the language of the law from the vantage point of the vernacular.

Corpus, Corpora

Libraries around the world hold about ninety extant manuscripts of the Siete Partidas. These manuscripts contain several versions and variants from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. At the end of the fifteenth century, manuscript dissemination among professionals was replaced by mechanical reproduction of the early editions. This replacement was technically efficient. Mechanized production began in 1491 with the edition Alonso Díaz de Montalvo published in Seville, which was intended for practicing lawyers—thus with additions and concordances to other active legal corpora, including the Copilación de las Leyes del Reyno (Seville, 1484), which Montalvo himself had been commanded to create after the Cortes of Toledo, in 1480. A few years later, Montalvo himself produced another edition of the Partidas, with an abundant apparatus of glosses in Latin, that he probably intended as a textbook for students of law, as the Partidas had become part of the university curriculum. The president of the Council of Indies, Gregorio López Madera, prepared a new edition in 1555, during the regency of Juana de Austria. While Carlos V and his son, Philip, performed the ceremonies of abdication of the political body of the former on the natural body of the latter, the Siete Partidas upheld the theory and practice of monarchical power during the period of the regency.

While the Real Academia de la Historia produced a new critical edition of the Siete Partidas as late as in 1807—which became the preferred edition—the 1555 edition was already considered to be best and most comprehensive within ten years of its publication. Surrounded by hundreds of glosses and followed by commentaries and other independent glosses, the 1555, or "imperial," edition had become the repository of a centuries-long tradition of legal discussion throughout the kingdom and the Iberian empire.

The history of the Siete Partidas remains largely uncharted. It is also so long and convoluted, and so expansive, that the production of a stable text became, very early, a legal need and a tour de force. According to Title 18 of the Ordenamiento de Alcalá of 1348, King Alfonso XI had already initiated this philological and legal operation by situating his great-grandfather's code in a prominent place in the hierarchy of legal sources of the kingdom. He recognized that the Partidas had never been promulgated before and that they had not been "received as laws." Alfonso XI, then, had the extant manuscripts collected, and after comparing the different versions, he had them amended "in some required points," and, he continues, "thus harmonized and amended, because they were drawn and taken from the sayings of the holy fathers and from the laws and sayings of many ancient wise men, and from fueros and customs of Spain, we now give them as our laws."

That the Partidas had not been hitherto received as law means that they had not been promulgated, that their existence was that of a codex rather than that of a code. "Reception," as in "received as laws" here, is a technical term that indicates the process of recognition of something as a constitutive part of a legal tradition. This is the same expression that is used to explain that the "reception" of Roman law in the Iberian Peninsula, and therefore the reception of the ius commune, begins with certain legal codes that are sometimes iura propria, like the Fuero de Cuenca, or more general legislative projects, including, of course, the Fuero Real, the Espéculo, and the Siete Partidas. This is what "reception" means.

There is, however, another sense to the notion of reception. For there is, indeed, a reception of the Siete Partidas in the sense that they were transmitted and copied; they were used and translated in Catalan and Portuguese, at least partially. They were, therefore, part of a discussion, and definitely part of a legal debate in which they were not deemed winners. Even when they were received as laws, they were received only as suppletive law, in the lowest place of a hierarchy of legal sources. So, there are two receptions of the Partidas: one that is not as laws, from approximately 1270 until 1348; and another one as laws, from 1348 onward. Since a law published on February 28, 2015, still uses the Fifth Partida as its legal foundation and rationale, one can say that the expression "from 1348 onward" is quite precise.

Even once received as laws, reading the Partidas is quite a challenging experience. The Second Partida is frequently invoked as a mirror of princes, and therefore one piece of machinery within a long and discontinuous tradition of discussing the techniques of good government. Other Partidas—like the Seventh, which is devoted to criminal law and the penal system—have been read as renditions of particular social struggles, like the titles regarding Jews (24), Muslims (25), and heretics (26), that come together in this part of the legislative code. It is common to consider, alternatively, the Partidas as a source of information or, conversely, as a text that seems to be completely out of line with the society that supported it—or rather did not. In other words, traditional perspectives of the Partidas make it difficult to understand that the Siete Partidas are first, foremost, and even exclusively, a body of legislation.

The most durable official text of the Partidas is the one transmitted by the 1555 "imperial" edition, which was perpetuated by the editor's grandson, Gregorio López de Tovar in 1567 and then reprinted many times, with or without new prologues and appendices, well into the eighteenth century. Its official character was reinstated in 1867 by the Spanish Tribunal Supremo, after the short official tenure of the 1807 text by the royal cédula (a kind of decree) of 1818. The Boletín Oficial del Estado reprinted the 1555 Partidas, with accompanying laws, in 1969, 1974, and 1975. The law from February 2015 also uses the 1555 edition.

The vastness of the corpus is comparable only to the number of textual issues arising from the study of the history of the textual tradition. I will always give the references according to the 1555 edition, which I will compare with the manuscripts and other editions where relevant. I will sometimes focus more specifically on particular pieces of the manuscript tradition, as I do in the chapter on friendship (Chapter 4).

The Alfonsine Era

On a couple of occasions, I have mentioned the Alfosine Era. This was how the Muslim and Jewish astronomers in the employ of King Alfonso defined the new astronomical and historical era in which they worked. The point of this era's departure was, geographically, the city of Toledo and, chronologically, the beginning of King Alfonso's rule. Although printed editions of the Astronomical Tables included specific tables with the equivalences among the different calendars, neither the astronomers nor King Alfonso himself thought that this new era would replace all the other eras. It added something new to the other calendars: it introduced new elements into the history of humankind, and, in a certain way, it challenged present and future subjects to identify those elements and to describe themselves in the light of the star alignment called the Alfonsine Era. The Alfonsine workshop—the whole world of intellectual research and production surrounding the king and summoned by him—intended to populate this era with historiographical accounts, scientific research, and poetic, visual, and musical creativity, and, perhaps more important, a powerful legislative drive that intended to change the definition of the clients of the law and their relationship with the lawgiver forever.

The existence of an Alfonsine Era is an interesting trope that figures our understanding of the meaning of our work and our interest in focusing on the Iberian Middle Ages. The Alfonsine Era has an intellectual and historical character that worked in the short term, by means of the specific events and productions of the Alfonsine rule (1252-1282), and still works in the longue durée, because the Alfonsine textual and intellectual products are in a constant process of critique and re-elaboration that has lasted several centuries. Quite pointedly, it still does (remember, the very recent law based on the Partidas mentioned above). Likewise, the Alfonsine Era had a broad geographic presence that included the newly conquered territories of the Iberian Peninsula, political influence on other Christian kingdoms of the same geographic area, and of course, the different moments of Iberian expansion in the early modern period. The Partidas, as it has been studied, has marked the legal history of the Americas, the Philippines, and other polities across the globe. In countries across the Americas, the process of independence during the nineteenth century was fulfilled only with the participation of the Siete Partidas in the process of implementation of new civil and penal codes, after the widespread Código de Bello from 1877 onward.

During the Alfonsine Era, the Partidas intervened in the debates taking place in many different spaces and traditions regarding the constitution of the legal discipline. First, in the debates of the Muslim world between Persia and Al-Andalus, several thinkers, including Ibn Sina, or Avicenna for the Latins, Al-Ghazālī, and Ibn Rushd (Averroes for the Latins), questioned the degree of autonomy of the legal discipline. Second, in the debates of some Jewish intellectuals regarding not only the autonomy of the legal discipline but also the relationships between written law and oral law and the common history of both, a debate championed by the Cordovan rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides) involved discussions between Al-Andalus thinkers, the Jewish intellectuals of southern France, and others across the Mediterranean basin. Third, Alfonso's legal work also intervened in the discussions about legal science and legal codification that took place in Christian Europe in relation to the study and marginal commentary on the corpus of Roman law and the corpus of canon law. To those discussions and to those practices of glossing and compilation (from Azo of Bologna to Accursius and from Johannes Teutonicus to Raymond of Penyafort, all between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries), Alfonso offered a set of new techniques and theories of legal codification. Finally, the Alfonsine Era intervened in the relationship that many polities—including the kingdom of Aragon and many domains in France, Italy, and Germany, as well as the very kingdom of Castile—entertained with their local and particular legal regulations, for instance, with the fueros, customary law, or even specific regulations that had replaced broader codifications, as happened in 1251 in Barcelona, when the more universal and imperial Liber Iudicium was replaced by the local Usatges de Barcelona by order of King Jaume I. In all these senses, the location of the Iberian Middle Ages constitutes a privileged vantage point from which to understand the Middle Ages and beyond.

By far, the most important reason to choose the Alfonsine Era as a vantage point is of a theoretical character. To be sure, it provides a historical and historicist knowledge that cannot be neglected in the study of medieval law and medieval intellectual and social history in general, but it also provides us specific perspectives on a number of issues whose theoretical relevance cannot be overstated. Two of them need to be highlighted. First, the analysis of the Partidas and its techniques and theories of codification shows us the processes and strategies whereby a legal discipline is designed to create specific institutions. Such institutional creativity is central to understanding the ways rules of law work from scratch and how they administer power and foster methods to create (legal) subjecthood. Second, as a complex process of codification that involves not only verbal representation but also material legal text, the Partidas gives us special access to the formation of legal vocabularies, legal materialities, and, what is more important, what I will call in this book "legal thinking"—that is, the different processes whereby the law and the legal discipline colonize society and public, daily language.

Perplexities and Incoherences

"My speech," says the rabbi, lawyer, and doctor Moshe ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides (1138-1204), "is directed to one who has philosophized and has knowledge of the true sciences, but believes at the same time in the matters pertaining to the Law and is perplexed as to their meaning because of the uncertain terms and parables." The idea of perplexity (ḥairah, in classical Arabic), implies a specific feeling of loss and disorientation in front of the law for all those who cannot avoid reading and interpreting it while philosophizing and submitting parables, metaphors, and other tropes and fictional devices to proper exegesis.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, perplexity was not only a feeling but also a gateway to sin. For Christian theologians, the perplexitas conscientiae, or perplexed conscience, means that one has located oneself in the middle of a dilemma (as Dougherty has expressed it) that will always lead toward sin—so the person confessing the dilemma to the priest needs to know the lesser sin in order to choose. This idea of perplexity is less philosophical in nature, although it is connected to Maimonides's sense of perplexity by means of the fear that one will sin.

Maimonides's ideas on perplexity cannot be disentangled from the debates taking place in the Mediterranean basin on the possibility of using pagan philosophy and pagan modes of thinking in order to read and interpret the Law. Persian philosophers like Avicenna (980/370-1037/428) or Al-Ghazālī (1058/450-1111/505, normally called Algazel in the West) debated those positions in several treatises that were discussed across the Islamic world, including the Iberian Peninsula. In Al-Andalus, the debate took place mostly, but not exclusively, in the Cordovan environment, in which both Maimonides and his contemporary Averroes (1126/520-1189/595) were initially active. This debate was well expressed in two works, the Incoherence of the Philosophers, by Al-Ghazālī, and Averroes's response, The Incoherence of the Incoherence. These works, as well as Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed, were not only widely disseminated and read but also translated into Latin, as Destructio Philosophorum, Destructio Destructionis Philosophorum Algacelis, and Dux Neutrorum ac Dubitantium, seu Perplexorum, respectively.

In this book I will frequently talk about the Siete Partidas as perplexing legislation. Indeed, I contend that the practice of dead voice, according to Alfonso, is a way for him to indirectly participate in the Mediterranean debate regarding perplexity and incoherence. Instead of proposing a theory of how to interpret the Law with the collaboration of philosophy and exegesis, Alfonso goes one step ahead in order to embrace, as I will demonstrate in this book, the productive character of perplexity.

This productivity means, therefore, a specific practice of legal codification in which philosophy, fictional devices, and exegetical procedures collaborate in solidarity with the production of the Law. The combination of law, philosophy, and fiction is Alfonso X's response to his foremost challenge. Alfonso suggests a legal code that will keep its integrity over time, that cannot be altered, and whose content at the level of both the letter and the spirit of the law will be remembered. This is Alfonso's main concern for dead voice, as we will see in Chapter 1, as well as for the articulation of an aesthetics of law (explored in Chapter 5 of this book) in the process of the construction of a vernacular jurisdiction (Chapter 2).

Argument and Chapters in This Book

The argument I am going to build in this book is that the response to these issues and their challenges is the deployment of a technique of codification that, using an Alfonsine expression, I call dead voice. Dead voice is the juridical institution that governs the production of legal norms and documents with the force of law. Alfonso defines "dead voice" as "writing," and so does the index to the Partidas prepared in 1576 by Gregorio López de Tovar to accompany the imperial edition of the Partidas, which was published by his grandfather, Gregorio López Madera, in 1555.

This juridical institution of dead voice, or writing, is in its turn governed by a fictio legis, or "fiction of the law," according to which what has been established according to the regulations of legal writing is as if it were new. As we will see in Chapter 1, this fictio legis has consequences for the conception of both legal writing and the temporalities of legal writing.

Dead voice is, in fact, not only writing but also a writing technique or a series of writing techniques, some of them explicit, some implicit in the code itself. I use the concept of dead voice to evince a theory—a vision—of legal codification. One of the key elements of this set of techniques is that they involve an emotional tension, a new relationship between the client of the law, whether professional or not, and the law itself. This relationship is an affective one. In other words, dead voice involves an affective set of techniques for legal codification.

To achieve this, I argue, the legislator needs to reclaim the very concept of legislation and redraw it from scratch. The result of this redrawing of the legislative techniques gives rise to what I have called perplexing legislation—that is, fighting the affect of fear to sin—by including philosophical bodies of knowledge and fictional devices as constitutive elements of the legal text.

Dead voice is about how to think about the law from affective and perplexing perspectives: the legislator uses the articulation of perplexing legislative techniques as a way to codify an affective legal system in which philosophy and fictions incorporate aesthetic devices at two levels—that of perception and Artistotelian aesthetics, on the one hand, and that of the aesthetic character of poetic and narrative or literary resources, on the other. An important part of this argument is that dead voice involves the creation of a legal aesthetics—a legislative system in which the people are responsible for the perception and integrity of the legal code. In this legal turn, which is governed by Aristotelian aesthetics, the perceptive subject, the one in charge of sensing the law and its political consequences, is the people itself, defined as the "sensitive soul" of the kingdom. This sensitive soul is required by law to perform both external and internal sensory operations—externally perceiving the proper work of the law in the world, and internally thinking and memorizing the full array of legal statements at both the normative and the documentary level. "Memorizing" here does not mean "to know by heart" but rather to be able to remember the ways in which the law presents itself as a law and the ways in which this law-being-law indexes the origin of sovereignty.

I contend that this sort of dead voice and legal aesthetics have the purpose of building juridical persons within a vernacular jurisdiction. The juridical person (legal subject, persona ficta) is the result of extending legal aesthetic responsibilities across the territory, the new political space, in a capillary way—getting to the last corner of the newly conquered regions, cities, and other locations that constitute emerging centers of power within the jurisdiction and that therefore constitute new issues in the theories and practices of jurisdiction and sovereignty.

In order to understand those issues and their political consequences, I am suggesting the concept of vernacular jurisdiction. Indeed, dead voice is a vernacular institution, a technique of codification based on the invention of a vernacular juridical language. This vernacular juridical language universalizes the legal code—dead voice itself—across the kingdom, breaking with some of the then-current legal diglossic systems, since the law and the clients of the law expressed themselves in different languages.

The final consequence of this complex argument is very clear: a piece of intellectual history, and the intellectual implications of a legal project, cannot be disentangled from the social and political implications this project has. In other words, the only way in which intellectual history can be productive is when it becomes so profoundly embedded in social transformations and political contestation that they cannot be told apart. Of course, my argument focuses mainly on the intellectual part, because I believe that the study of legal codifications has neglected some of the questions I am raising in this book.

I have divided the book into five chapters. Chapter 1, "Dead Voice," delves into the regulation of legal writing. The regulation of legal writing entails, as I argue, the configuration of legal temporalities, legal materialities, and legal subjects that are closely intertwined. I will contend that the intellectual support for all this is the creation of a legal philology—an art of production, transmission, and control of the legal material text. This legal philology and its disciplinary responsibility was held and enacted by the growingly pervasive activity and presence of those strange legal philologists who fell under the general category of notaries (and that includes many kinds of professionals). I demonstrate how unveiling the political strategies underwriting a dialectics of voice (that is, the antithetical relationship between dead voice and living voice that would call for a synthetic solution) challenges the common distinctions between oral, unwritten law, and written law. Dead voice is a response to the struggles between customary legal systems and the revolutionary drive to codify the law while maintaining juridical procedures based in living voice.

The second chapter argues that one of the central consequences of a perplexing codification based on dead voice is the production of what I call vernacular jurisdiction (which gives the chapter its title). Vernacular jurisdiction is a visible, empirical model in which sovereignty and jurisdiction collaborate in order to redefine the environment where the law applies. This is also the environment in which the process of codification becomes the agent of universalization of the Spanish vernacular as a legal technical language.

Chapter 3 is entitled "Revenant Manuscripts." This chapter argues that dead voice lives through manuscripts. These manuscripts have archival, documentary, and even literary lives that are separated from the biological lives they refer to. They are presented, submitted, exhibited, and argued in circumstances in which they perform acts. They are preserved not in one but in many archives at different times. They also configure a documentary poetics (a term that comes from Emily Steiner) through which they colonize other disciplines and even common, everyday speech. In sum, revenant manuscripts produce, I contend, "legal thinking" within the vernacular jurisdiction, that is, the interpretation of experiences as legal experiences, something that fosters the colonization of society by legal language and the appropriation of other disciplines by the legal discipline.

One of the intended consequences of perplexing codifications and dead voice is, as noted earlier, the articulation of an affective regime. This affective regime is part of the legislation—the legislator inscribed it in the law as law. In Chapter 4, "Legislating Friendship," I focus on the Title 27 of the Fourth Partida that concerns legislating friendship. With the purpose of legislating friendship, the lawgiver uses philosophical corpora and fictional devices that allow him to constitute a jurisdiction and legal thinking based on an institution of nature that works because of love relations (a love, of course, juridically defined). This institutionalization of nature that works by means of love is the result of a legal fiction. This legislation of friendship is particularly important in the context of the division and repopulation of the newly conquered territories during the thirteenth century and the redefinition of the expanding vernacular jurisdiction.

The fifth chapter, "Sensitive Souls," analyzes another facet of the intended consequences of codifying the law with philosophical corpora and fictional devices. In this case, I analyze the ways in which Aristotelian aesthetics were mobilized with the purpose of redefining the concept of people. The relevant legislation defines the people as the sensitive soul of the kingdom and endows them with the aesthetic and cognitive responsibilities of perceiving, thinking, and judging the stability of the political space. This aesthetic legislation fosters what we call a politics of the soul, that is, a redefinition of the mind-soul-intellect complex (as discussed in Aristotelian commentaries and readapted for the legislation of the Second Partida), not for theological purposes that would imply that the soul is the property of God, but rather for civil and political purposes that highlight the question of whether the soul is a property of the legal subject only insofar as the legal subject is already a composite between the body politic and the political soul: to whom does this political soul belong?

This book concludes with a discussion that evaluates the kind of problems that I have analyzed and the new questions they elicit. I then propose some new avenues of research. I do not conceive of this book as research in legal history, because I do not locate myself within the legal discipline. On the contrary, I want to locate myself outside the disciplinary conditions of legal history, in the realm of cultural history, in order to read the production of law not as a way to address the continuity and self-replication of the discipline but rather as a cultural project with political consequences.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1. Dead Voice
Chapter 2. Vernacular Jurisdiction
Chapter 3. Revenant Manuscripts
Chapter 4. Legislating Friendship
Chapter 5. Sensitive Souls
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"Bringing together a multitude of discourses with subtlety and deftness, Jesús R. Velasco undertakes a rare interpretation of the Siete Partidas and offers far-reaching and compelling conclusions."

Cornell University Simone Pinet

"In his sophisticated literary treatment of the Siete Partidas, Jesús R. Velasco shifts the disciplinary frame away from legal history in a move that will be welcomed by scholars interested in medieval law and sovereignty."

Karl Shoemaker

"Combining rigorous scholarship, a capacious interdisciplinary approach, and a rendering of his findings in a haunting poetical language, Jesús Velasco's book is the most insightful study of the Siete partidas written in a long time . . . Dead Voice is a special book, to be read with the same pleasure one feels when one savors veryfinewine. It is a shining example of how tackling a topic from an erudite and multidisciplinary approach can produce a great scholarly work that is also movingly beautiful."—Speculum

"Jesús Velasco's remarkable book on the Siete Partidas provides a number of unique and intriguing perspectives on the Alfonsine legal masterpiece. The author clearly states that he does not intend to write a legal history—the relationships of manuscripts, sources, specific translations etc.—but rather a cultural history, a rethinking of the Siete Partidas as a cultural product with political consequences."—Bulletin of Spanish Studies

"Bringing together a multitude of discourses with subtlety and deftness, Jesús R. Velasco undertakes a rare interpretation of the Siete Partidas and offers far-reaching and compelling conclusions."—Simone Pinet, Cornell University

"In his sophisticated literary treatment of the Siete Partidas, Jesús R. Velasco shifts the disciplinary frame away from legal history in a move that will be welcomed by scholars interested in medieval law and sovereignty."—Karl Shoemaker, University of Wisconsin, Madison

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