Both the modern printed book and the medieval manuscript offer solutions to the universal challenge of efficiently navigating a long text. Both, moreover, are part of the same centuries-long tradition. Thus, although far from identical, they bear enough commonalities that meaningful comparisons can be drawn between them. To put it another way, book layouts that mark different stages of the same process of development can be said to be written in the same language.
Public performances contain similar cues meant to help the audience navigate the event’s content and meaning. These range from overt messages clear to everyone present to subtle signals meant for only a few. As with books, some measure of cultural literacy is required to make sense of them. Such prompts are often visual, with particular combinations of color or symbols expressing complex messages about the nature of the spectacle.4 But they can also be verbal, with explicit statements or the tone of a speaker’s voice pointing the audience in the desired direction. Styles of dress, written signs, verbal hints, the layout of the venue: these cues act in concert to inform spectators of the type of event presented, its structure, its message, and their role. The audience can also add its own prompts, whether invited to do so or not. As these can materially affect the unfolding of the spectacle, the boundary between actors and audience is often murky.
At times, spectators play an invited, supportive role in a spectacle. Fans at modern sporting events create banners, perform synchronized gestures, engage in chants. The applause at a concert or play is an expected response that not only signals the audience’s approval but also acts as a ritualized conclusion to the performance. But audience responses do not always fit with the intended aims of a spectacle. Public spectacles always bore the possibility that some groups would take advantage of the assembled masses to advance unofficial agendas.
The interpretation of crowd reactions is often difficult. Even when we know what audience members did or said in response to a particular event, it is not always clear whether they acted to bolster or challenge its intended meaning. The response of the crowd to the Farce of Ávila is a case in point. Angus MacKay has argued that the rebel leaders sought to overcome a challenge inherent in replacing a reigning monarch: there could not be two living kings in the same land.5 Although he rejects the idea that the conspirators believed the effigy actually became Enrique IV in some magical way, MacKay contends it did represent the death of the king and the passing of kingship from Enrique to Alfonso.6 In doing so, he relies on a pair of related ideas: the Castilian understanding that kings depended on noble election and popular acclamation for their legitimacy and the more general medieval notion of the king’s two bodies, the separation of the physical person of the king and the dignitas of the crown.7 For the conspirators, Enrique did not die at Ávila, but King Enrique did perish when symbolically stripped of his emblems and thrown to the ground. From this perspective, the crowd’s lament was a necessary step in the ritual sequence needed to depose one king and crown another. Alfonso could take the stage to be crowned only after the people’s cries had confirmed that the effigy was dead and the throne vacant. And he could only truly be king once they had acclaimed him.8
Scholars have generally assumed that the lament was pro forma, an imitation of the ritual cryings (llantos) that took place at a royal funeral and preceded the acclamation of a king’s successor. But, if this was indeed the case, the language used by the chroniclers is curious. Alfonso de Palencia, although an ardent polemicist who rarely missed an opportunity to heap invective on Enrique, noted that the effigy fell to the ground “amid the sobs of those present who seemed to be crying because of the unfortunate [desastrada] death of the deposed.”9 If the lament was a necessary element in the ritual, why did Palencia choose to describe it as a spontaneous outpouring of grief and not explicitly as a llanto? At the funeral rites conducted in Ávila upon Enrique’s actual death in 1474, the laments not only are unambiguously referred to in the sources as llantos but bear a markedly formal character. In this case, the funeral procession stopped at four different locations on its way to the cathedral. At each of these, a black shield was shattered to the cry of “¡A por buen rey é buen Señor!”10
The idea of a ritual lament also implies that Enrique was presented as a real king deserving of the proper protocols of respect. The conspirators, in planning the event, had decided that the best means of discrediting Enrique was to accuse him of tyranny and weakness, characterizing their rebellion as a response to “the swift and sudden oppression of a tyrant who had in his favor neither mental energy, nor talent, nor capacity, nor any other gifts.” This reasoning supposes that Enrique, lacking the perquisite qualities, had never truly been a legitimate king. A ritual crying was therefore unnecessary and a potential distraction from the central message that Enrique was “king in name only.”11 Furthermore, a formal lament required either that the crowd had been advised in advance to cry out at the predetermined time or that they were so well versed in royal funereal customs as to know precisely the correct moment for the lament. The latter was no mean feat. The effigy had been dressed in mourning (as if already dead) throughout the deposition but only symbolically lost its kingship upon hitting the ground. The former seems equally unlikely, as Palencia noted that the construction of the stage was the only means of publicity used to attract the people of Ávila. While the crowd could well have been “seeded” with sympathizers prepared to lead the crowd at the right time, they would have needed to be convincing indeed to entice all those present to go along. These difficulties and Palencia’s choice of words indicate that the crowd’s wailing was not anticipated, but potentially signaled that the show did not altogether please the crowd, that Enrique enjoyed at least some support in Ávila and the people felt genuine sorrow at the harsh treatment given to him in effigy.
Yet Palencia reported that this same audience erupted a short time later into the popular acclamation symbolically necessary for Alfonso to become king.12 This seems more like the intended and perhaps planned response that MacKay suggests and challenges the idea that their prior lament for Enrique was a display of contrary emotion. So what really happened? In all likelihood, some spectators expressed genuine grief, some understood that the llanto was needed to depose Enrique properly, some followed the lead of those around them, and others remained silent. In this sense, the crowd was typical, demonstrating the difficulty of characterizing the actions, emotions, or thoughts of an assembly as if it was a unified entity. Even if medieval people conceived their identities in corporate terms, their thoughts remained their own. It does not follow that they were necessarily subsumed in the collective identity presented in a spectacle. Some at Ávila may indeed have comprehended and embraced the deeper meanings of the Farce, but we should view with skepticism the claim that all did.
When historians write about popular contexts to political propaganda, they are, in essence, describing elite efforts to sway the populace rather than directly addressing the popular reception of such propaganda. Insofar as elites of the time knew popular mind-sets better than we can, studies of how they expected (or hoped) the people would react do indeed shed light on the crowd’s responses. But there is a tendency to assume that elite agendas were realized, that the crowd understood spectacles to mean just what was intended by those who presented them.
This same set of issues holds true for spectacles conducted in frontier cities; indeed the twin stressors of amiable enmity and physical insecurity meant that both the tendency for a multiplicity of responses and the pressure on spectators to conform to those around them may have been even more intense than elsewhere. There too, however, scholars have tended to limit themselves to recreating elite perspectives. Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s program of spectacles in 1460s Jaén is known chiefly through the contemporary Hechos del condestable, whose author was not only an intimate of Miguel Lucas, the constable of Castile, but likely participated in many of the events described. This chronicle, which revolves around detailed descriptions of the numerous feasts, pageants, and rituals that Miguel Lucas organized to commemorate nearly every significant day on the calendar, explicitly presented him as a latter-day Cid, recounting the constable’s struggles with his rivals, his daring feats against
