chronicler’s emphasis on Miguel Lucas’s persona reveals the intent of his theatrical productions in ways that a more journalistic approach may not. But it also presents a perspective shared primarily by the town’s elites, telling us little about how the majority of people in Jaén experienced and understood the festivities.
Modern scholars are well aware of this problem and have focused on the intended political utility of Miguel Lucas’s theatrics to argue convincingly that he used spectacles to augment his own status and to diffuse social tensions by directing lower-class unrest toward external enemies.13 This approach does not seek nonelite perspectives for Jaén’s festivals, instead giving voice to the oppressed by exposing the strategies of the powerful. But, in limiting the gaze to those on stage, those scholars casually contend that the “entire urban population” of Jaén lent their support to these festivals, cheerfully absorbing not only the playacting but also the political content, and implies widespread complicity in Miguel Lucas’s agenda.14 The conclusion here, as in MacKay’s study of the Farce of Ávila, is that the common people bought into the propaganda presented to them. In both cases, the crowd’s role is reduced to a single voice, a unified roar of support. Certainly Palencia and the author of the Hechos wanted their audiences to think so, but can we trust them?
So how can historians represent enacted performances and oral popular culture known solely through such texts? Even leaving aside the question of authorial bias, the symbolic gestures in any performance are inherently ambiguous and thus capable of bearing multiple meanings in a sense that words can never be. Language can be thought of as sequential, with each word modified by the next to ultimately create meaning, while visual depictions present multiple images simultaneously, which must be read together for proper interpretation. Such multivalence is an essential aspect of a spectacle’s relevance to its audiences, for it allows meanings to be indeterminate, endlessly modifiable.
A written description of a spectacle can therefore never include all the various potential meanings because an author must emphasize one while minimizing others. Still less can the written word capture the divergent responses of engaged and participatory audiences to those multiple meanings. To return briefly to a textual metaphor, it is as if the ambiguous character of both the symbolic elements of the spectacle itself and of the crowd’s response are the marginalia on the page of a manuscript, the commentaries that offer insight into the significance found in a static text by its various readers. The chroniclers who transcribed the event offer us not the complete, annotated version but a formal, modern edition that carries only a single “authentic” version in which viewpoints apart from the dominant one have been submerged. Modern parallels offer a possible means of recovering these lost glosses, but with the danger of unintentionally introducing anachronistic concepts. But there are other options. By identifying various contemporary discourses on the social functions of spectacle, we can apply an insight gained through modern spectacle—that spectator responses are individual but constrained—while ensuring that these are confirmed by medieval sources.
Contemporary controversies over the nature and presentation of medieval pageants offer several points of view through which they were interpreted, which are roughly analogous to the “three orders” of medieval society: the rulers (e.g., the king, nobility, and knights), the church, and the people. Such a division is laid out in Alfonso X’s thirteenth-century legal code, which noted:
There are three kinds of festivals, the first, those which the Holy Church orders to be observed in honor of God and the saints; as, for instance, Sundays, the birthday of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and those of Holy Mary, of the Apostles, and of the other male and female saints. The second are those which emperors and kings order to be observed in honor of themselves; as, for instance, the days on which they are born; those of their sons who expect to reign, or the days of which they have been successful in great battles with the enemies of the Faith by conquering them, and such other days as they order to be observed in honor of themselves, which are treated in the Title on Citations. The third kind, called Ferias, are instituted for the common benefit of men, as, for instance, days upon which fruits are gathered.15
Members of each group not only participated in each kind of spectacle in different ways but also were able to draw upon a set of shared experiences and associations that conditioned their responses when they were in the audience. If we describe the interplay between cues, symbols, and associations that organized spectacles as a language, then each of these groups could be said to share a distinct dialect through which they filled in the symbolic images presented to them with the specifics of their own perspectives. This is not, of course, to say that membership in a social group imposed absolute limits on an individual’s possible reactions or that a certain performance would appeal to only one such group and no other. There was, in fact, a great deal of overlap. Many medieval religious festivals had secular aspects; at the same time, most secular festivals also had a strong religious component. Audiences were often diverse. Penitential processions, burlesque tournaments, royal entrances, spontaneous revelries—all these drew spectators and participants across social, economic, gender, and even religious boundaries.
All types of urban spectacles drew on this language to evoke particular intended responses, and each type inspired a range of corporate responses. A popular celebration such as Carnival might be broadly supported by the people, viewed with suspicion by nobles and civic authorities watchful for signs of trouble, and roundly condemned by the church on moral grounds. The perspectives characteristic of each group, however, did not constrain individuals: we do not have to look hard to find carousing priests, moralizing knights, or nervous townsfolk. But, as we shift the focus from the intent behind public spectacles to their popular reception, the interactions between these dominant strands of discourse become central. A number of critics have construed the individual as strong in the face of cultural pressures and have emphasized the ability of spectators to remake meanings to their own specifications. But these critics tend to minimize the multiplicity of influences that shape the experience and perception of performances.16 We cannot reduce audience response to a dichotomy of conformity or resistance. Nor can we say that individuals freely created their own responses. Instead there was a limited spectrum of possibilities established by ingrained cultural patterns. The sponsors of urban performances may not have been able to put a name to these processes, but they were aware of them. What they presented to the public, therefore, took into account their perceptions of likely reactions. Audiences may not have had a visible or the decisive role in determining the content of a performance, but their influence was profound and ubiquitous.
A full consideration of the range of responses to all the myriad forms of spectacle in fifteenth-century Castile would be unwieldy. A detailed reading, however, of the ways in which the nobility and the church rationalized and critiqued the knightly tournament can serve to illustrate the interplay of multiple perspectives and their influence on audience responses. Tournaments were one of the most common urban spectacles. As such, they spawned an outpouring of rhetoric that often invoked issues directly related to the frontier.
Fifteenth-century Castilian tournaments took place within the context of significant changes in the position of the aristocracy. To understand what nobles thought of their tournaments, therefore, it is necessary to first consider these contexts. On the one hand, a succession of weak kings accorded the greatest nobles unprecedented influence and power, while the Granadan frontier offered autonomy and glory, leading Castilian chivalry to the pinnacle of its fame. On the other, competition from the caballeros de cuantía (non-noble mounted warriors) and letrados (university graduates trained in canon or civil law) undermined the aristocracy’s traditional military and political roles. At the same time, nobles increasingly lived in cities where they often had to understand and address the needs of urban constituencies. These social and economic changes inspired passionate discussions on the functions of chivalry, nobility, and monarchy. Among the nobles, these took place through literary debates that explored the comparative values of arms and letters or of birth and personal achievement.17 In order to appeal to the populace, however,
