Pre-departure musings
It’s been a while since my last post and another is more than overdue. Winter break has afforded me ample time to relax, catch up and look with anticipation to an exciting spring semester. It has also given me the ability to catch up on things I did not get to do at the end of the fall semester, such as to summarize the final weeks of our paleography session. Like Amanda and Kim, I enjoyed reading the witch trial accounts of María de Ulibarri. While I still have to struggle through many of the words I read, I have been amazed how, over the weeks, the text on the page no longer looks unintelligible or intimidating. Rather, it seems familiar and manageable. I experience the same then when I encounter a challenging piece of classical music for the first time (I play violin). Over the weeks, the seemingly impossible collection of notes reveals itself to me in a comprehensible fashion.
For me, the bigger struggle has been to take the words I can usually decode and make sense of what is actually going on in the accounts. My Spanish reading comprehension skills still need work. However, as I will explain soon, that will hopefully change dramatically in the coming months. Other than trying to figure out the context of these records, smaller hurdles presented themselves as well in the sources for the last few weeks of the semester. First off, the bleed-through was particularly pronounced, meaning that on any given page I often had to ignore whole stretches of text which interfered with the words actually written for that page. Further, it is easy to get tied up in names, especially at the end of the last account we read concerning a list of suspected witches. Finally, the scribe here did a poor job separating words with spaces, often time stringing completely different words together without any spaces while on the other hand separating parts of a word by spaces that were not needed. Phrases like ”su culpa” and “en el” are written as “suculpa” and “enel”, whereas a word like “por” may have the “p” by itself and the “or” separated by an unnecessary space.
As for the research planned for the spring over William and Mary’s spring break, I am extremely excited. Professor Homza sent us a PDF of the index of the General Archive of Navarre. Having looked through it, I am most interested in the sección de clero. I would love to do work that builds on the research I conducted this summer on clerical residence. One possibility is to continue to focus on bishops, such as Dr. Bernal, bishop of Calahorra in the sixteenth century, since Calahorra is in Navarre and records on Bernal would be in Pamplona. I also would not mind focusing on the relationship between the bishop in a diocese and monks or cathedral canons, as the Church had a hard time making clear who was in charge where. Bishops often complained of having insufficient authority to control many other clerics in their jurisdiction. Upon conferral with Professor Homza and further planning, I am sure I can come up with a specific focus that will work best for me. I am often surprised how my final research topic is quite different from what I originally seek to do, so we will see what happens.
Perhaps the thing I look forward to most this spring is how my academic semester up until the archival research will be constant preparation for my work in Navarre. I am studying abroad in Toledo, Spain from January 14th to April 28th. My main focus will be to become proficient in Spanish, which will help me improve my ability to read and interpret the language. Additionally, I plan to study Spanish culture, history and art in class and on my own while studying abroad. This familiarity with the country should make it easier for me to draw broader connections from my archival study to what was going on in Spain as a whole in the early modern period. As a side-note, one of the things I am looking forward to most is visiting the same sites that many of the historical figures I have studied resided at. For instance, one of the reform minded clerics I studied, Bartolomé Carranza, was archbishop of Toledo in the second half of the sixteenth century. Like I mentioned before, I will be conducting archival research in the area where Dr. Bernal served as bishop of Calahorra.
The plan now is to get ready for Spain and to continue to prepare for the week in Pamplona through email contact with the group back in the States. I plan to write on this blog some of the interesting things I learn while in Spain which relate back to this project.