contemporary records that address them?
These questions matter because, as we will see, the success of the Farce of Ávila depended on the responses of the audience. People watching the event were more than onlookers, they played a role as important as those on stage. In this regard, the Farce was akin to most other urban spectacles. Processions, festivals, tournaments, political theater—all were moments that brought together people from all social classes to engage in dialogues, sometimes overt but more often subtle, about the nature of society and its priorities and values. Access to the necessary financing, expertise, and social capital permitted municipal councils, cathedral chapters, and nobles to determine the content of most public performances. Their control, however, was not absolute. Other privileged members of the community, such as merchants and artisans, sought and often obtained influence over civic spectacles, particularly annual events such as Corpus Christi. More generally, elites had to present messages that the urban population would accept; spectacles that failed to accord with popular expectations or sentiments were worse than useless, creating unrest or leaving the sponsor open to public ridicule.
This was especially relevant in frontier cities where powerful and contradictory impulses meant that a wrong step could have severe repercussions. Elites there had to tread carefully indeed if they wanted to direct public sentiment, especially regarding religious minorities, in particular directions.
Audience participation was a common feature of public pageants that permitted spectators to directly and immediately signal their approval or displeasure. The meanings of spectacles were therefore created by both sponsors and audiences. Each group or social class, even each individual, brought a set of expectations and values to a performance and created an ensemble of associations through which to interpret it. But spectacles were not, as some have suggested, blank tapestries on which the viewer could inscribe what he or she wished.2 Most spectacles bore dominant meanings intended by their sponsors to produce conditioned responses from both participants and observers. This meant that there was a relatively limited range of probable reactions.
To consider one common spectacle in which many of us have participated in one way or another, a graduation ceremony can bear different connotations for each participant and spectator. For one person, the event may inspire feelings of nostalgia for milestones past. Another observer may feel reminded that commencements are one of the very few occasions on which the entire educational community comes together. Degree recipients will likely focus on their own accomplishments, but they might also be thinking of unrelated issues or be planning a subversive statement. All the while, the speaker might be thinking of nothing more profound than not flubbing a name. Even given these potentially divergent responses, however, it would be the inattentive spectator indeed who lost sight of a commencement’s central purpose in recognizing the achievements of a graduating class.
This chapter outlines the complex relationship between a performance’s intended meanings and its reception by various audiences. Given the lack of contemporary evidence, many scholars have generalized what can be considered universal aspects of public spectacle, such as the presence of cues meant to help spectators understand the purpose and structure of a performance. Such cues are, and were, often meant to inform the audience of their proper roles: where to direct their attention, what to wear, when to stand, applaud, or be silent. Yet audiences do not always do what they are told. They might be disruptive, apathetic, or overly enthusiastic. And even when they do behave as intended, we cannot assume that this demonstrates their agreement with the performance. The spectators’ lament and acclamation at the Farce of Ávila, for instance, has been taken as evidence of their complicity. In fact, these acts reveal little of their actual reactions to the event.
The crowd’s behavior instead points to a central problem in the interpretation of medieval spectacles: eyewitnesses did not typically record their personal experiences, leaving us to reconstruct them through accounts from other sources. These include subjective descriptions penned by (usually) elite authors as well as legal codes and ordinances. Attempts to legislate proper behavior at public performances, to give one example, might indicate the kinds of disorderly conduct organizers expected to encounter. Since the sources offer limited insight at best, many scholars have dismissed audiences, considering them only when particularly strong reactions were recorded. Spectator responses, however, were rarely unanimous and usually fell somewhere between blatant complicity and opposition.
To understand the experience of the crowd, we therefore must look beyond contemporary accounts to approach what one scholar has called the “culture of the spectator.”3 Spectators were both free and constrained in their reactions as a host of individual factors (such as class, gender, and religion) interacted with both community solidarity and fragmenting social tensions. Individual spectator responses were influenced by these divergent pressures, by the staging and enactment of the spectacle, and by the physical surroundings. They were therefore unpredictable. At the same time, the reactions of surrounding members of the audience can have a powerful influence on the individual, channeling his or her latent reactions into a few particular directions. This ultimately limited the potential for destabilizing or subversive outbursts.
Multiple influences, thus, acted simultaneously to regulate the range of potential audience responses. Prominent among them were widely held opinions about certain subjects. In this chapter, I consider debates regarding knightly tournaments, one of the most popular and most controversial forms of spectacle at the time. By considering in turn each of the three orders of medieval society as understood at the time—the nobility, the church, and the populace—we can see how each produced independent strands of discourse. The many arguments made to rationalize or condemn festive military exercises as well as the ways in which these strands intersected and overlapped created a network of competing alliances and perspectives. Although these did not strictly curtail an individual’s potential responses, they did set limits within which onlooker experiences were likely to fall.
Although the focus is on tournaments, there were no absolute divisions between types of spectacle at this time. Fifteenth-century tournaments often included dramatic performances and popular festivities. Sometimes they even coincided with religious processions. This merging of genres resulted in part from a repurposing of tournaments, which previously had been limited to courtly settings. They were now presented in urban contexts to mixed audiences, leading sponsors to integrate popular and ecclesiastic elements in order to enhance their appeal. The pressures of the frontier, moreover, had created new social networks and alliances. Physical and ideological uncertainty undermined, or perhaps transcended, the traditional “three orders of society.” We must be careful, therefore, about lumping frontier spectacles into a general category of urban performances.
Such an analysis, moreover, is based in part on modern observations of crowd behavior, raising the question of the degree to which we can fruitfully draw comparisons between modern and medieval spectacles. Most references to twentieth- and twenty-first-century mass culture made by historians of medieval Castile are impressionistic, intended to clarify concepts through comparison to a familiar phenomenon or to lament enduring inequalities. This approach permits the reader to visualize the events more fully but raises epistemological questions. Do modern renditions of public spectacles, often enacted at least in part for tourist audiences, bear anything in common with their medieval antecedents? Or do such comparisons ultimately delude us into thinking that we can understand experiences that have been irretrievably lost?
Book layouts can help to explain how modern analogies might apply to medieval public spectacle. A modern scholarly text includes a number of features that help readers orient themselves and access critical information, including a table of contents, footnotes, page numbers, and indexes. Such tools are relatively specific, requiring a basic level of cultural literacy for easy use. The location and format of these finding aids vary widely and we would not expect to see the same layout for a novel, for instance, as for a scientific textbook. Similarly, the mise-en-page of a medieval manuscript contains helpful features, including the organization of the page into columns that accommodated glosses and commentaries and the use of incipits and initials, all of which permit the experienced
