Introduction

For many centuries, Romance morphology, syntax, vocabulary and semantics developed gradually, and could be represented in writing according to the old Latin writing systems. The idea of the deliberate invention of new Ibero-Romance ways of writing, intentionally distinct from the inherited Latin norm, was catalyzed by the import from France of the phonographic mode of reading Latin aloud in Church with a sound for each written letter. This requirement led first to the existence of two ways of saying the same word, and then, after the invention of Romance writing, to two ways of writing it. The word “Romance” was first applied to the new ways of writing, rather than to speech. Written and spoken “Medieval” Latin (known usually as grammatica) was in theory standardized over Europe. Written Ibero-Romance, used in many contexts by the mid-thirteenth century, might have developed as a single unit, but increasingly during the thirteenth century the separate political units of the Iberian Peninsula wanted to elaborate their own national written form; that is, the conceptual split between Ibero-Romance languages came after, but only shortly after, the conceptual split of “Medieval Latin” from Romance.

The development of written Spanish was not a single event, even though the appearance of complete texts in a deliberately new scripta, around 1200, was relatively sudden. Their arrival had a long prehistory, as Romance features had been present in texts for centuries, and no political overtones. But soon after the appearance of complete Romance texts, the mode was adopted for non-linguistic purposes only indirectly connected with its original point.

Romance languages developed from spoken Latin over many centuries. The choice of language names is notoriously tricky for the philologist studying these centuries, as within the Iberian Peninsula we are faced with the possibility of using “Vulgar Latin,” “Late Latin,” “Proto-Romance,” “Early Romance,” “Ibero-Romance” and even “el español primitivo”; the speakers themselves created no new language names, and used the phrase lingua latina to refer to their language throughout the whole period before the deliberate invention of new ways of writing. For it does seem that the word “Romance” (variously spelled) was first applied to the novel techniques of writing rather than to any register of speech. The modern analyst, on the other hand, naturally wishes to distinguish between the spoken language states of the fourth, eighth and twelfth centuries AD, which is why we feel justified in using a procedure which on the whole historical linguists would do well to be wary of; that is, we tend to apply to their language some names which its speakers did not use themselves. In particular, it has seemed reasonable to many to call the spoken language of the sixth to the eleventh centuries “Romance,” or “Early Romance,” which in this perspective comes later than “Latin” but earlier than the geographically restricted “Ibero-Romance” (or “Old Spanish”).

In the first part of the present study we shall glimpse the way in which, within the Peninsula, Early Romance appeared in written form. I am not here referring only to the linguistic mistakes which were unintentionally made in the Latin of inscriptions and manuscripts. There were also occasions when writers in the Iberian Peninsula were deliberately and consciously trying something different, when their non-standard written form was not just a straightforward, spontaneous and natural reflection of their speech, but an intellectual attempt to achieve something new. The presence of both intentional and unintentional phenomena of these types in the Peninsula are collectively summarized here as being the “prehistory of written Spanish,” using the language label “Spanish” in the way that Ramón Menéndez Pidal (e.g. Reference Menéndez Pidal1972) and Inés Fernández Ordóñez (e.g. Reference Fernández Ordóñez, Deyermond and Conde2010, Reference Sopena and López2011) have done, to mean what other scholars mean by “Ibero-Romance”; that is, it is not to be identified solely with Castilian.

Menéndez Pidal paid a great deal of attention to this prehistory in his Orígenes del español (see Del Valle's brief discussion in Chapter 1), which was devoted to the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries. He pointed out, for example, quite rightly, that we can learn from the way names of non-Latin places and people were written, since the scribes often had no canonical inherited form available and were left to their own devices. In general, those written features in the texts of this age which we can interpret as being inspired by Romance phonetics can indeed help us assess what those phonetics were; where it seems that Menéndez Pidal was probably overconfident was in the converse case, where he tended to suggest that the presence of the traditional written form of a word implied that the scribe used old-fashioned phonetics rather than merely that he had learned how to spell the word correctly. Several of the graphical choices made by scribes in the Peninsula during what has come to be known as the época de orígenes were not destined to become standard in the subsequent writing systems of Old Spanish, such as the spelling of the palatal affricate sound with a double letter gg in such names as Sánchez; that is, the sound now represented by the letters ch. Peterson (Reference Peterson2009: 254) has pointed out that in the early eleventh century the same person's name, now written as Ochoiz, of Basque etymology, was spelled in documents in twenty-one different ways, none of them Ochoiz. But, as António Emiliano has pointed out (e.g. 1991/1996, 2003), it is probably the case that most of the individual graphical (in his word, “scripto-linguistic”) solutions eventually adopted in the semi-standardized methods of writing Ibero-Romance in the early thirteenth century had in fact been used on occasion already, within documentation that was ostensibly Latinate.

The decision to represent in a new written format whole texts, rather than individual phonetic features or non-Latin words, when it was consciously taken in some areas of the Peninsula in the second half of the twelfth century, did not thus involve starting from scratch. To many modern analysts it has seemed natural to see Latin and Romance as already being separate whole languages before that time; but the features of both had coexisted in the texts of earlier centuries, and to understand the process that led to their eventual separation as two distinct modes it is worth deconstructing the phenomena into their component parts, taking what Ángel López García (Reference López García2000) would call a “modular” approach. In the next sections we will look in order at syntax, semantics, the lexicon, morphology, phonetics and orthography.

Syntax

Several aspects of Latin syntax changed over the years. But not as much as we might think. Within the Roman Empire itself, written Latin of a practical kind, such as that written by architects, doctors, gardeners, cooks and other professionals, has sometimes been described, inappropriately, as “Vulgar Latin” (see Herman Reference Herman2000). This is widely regarded now as an unhelpful way of describing these works, if only because what is often called “Vulgar Latin,” as opposed to “Classical Latin,” was in reality just “Latin,” spoken by all, whereas “Classical Latin” was a recherché register written by only a few and spoken by perhaps nobody. The grammar of texts prepared in non-literary registers during the Roman Empire is markedly more like that of later Romance than is the grammar of the highest literary register of that period; it is well known now, for example, that the default word order of the late fourth-century Peregrinatio, composed in a colloquial register by the probably Peninsular nun Egeria, is more or less the same as that of the average thirteenth-century Peninsular composition. Similarly, tenth-century Peninsular documents often attest a VSO (or VS) order, particularly in subordinate clauses, more characteristic of later Romance than of most Latin works written during the Roman Empire. We can also watch, without much surprise, as the documentation of this época de orígenes uses more prepositions (particularly de) and fewer case inflections than would have been the case during the Empire, although the prepositions themselves are not new. Robert Blake (e.g. Reference Blake and Wright1991), who has shown how the syntax of many documents of the age is effectively that of the Romance of the time rather than that of the Latin of the distant past, refers to these documents as being “Latinate”; that is, Romance in syntax, although the scribe is still aiming to make the document look like Latin through his use of the traditional spelling. These word-order and other syntactic phenomena are probably not intentional, though; the scribes used those developed features of syntax in writing merely because they used them in speech, rather than out of any conscious desire to revolutionize the written form itself.

Semantics

The study of the semantics of the documentation of that age has not been undertaken to any great extent. Even so, there is a sizeable number of words whose meaning changed between the first and the twelfth century. If we find these words being used in ostensibly Latinate texts with their evolved meaning, that is, with their Ibero-Romance meaning rather than their older Latin one, this supports the hypothesis that the scribe was writing his natural Romance language by disguising it under the old-fashioned orthographical mode, which was the only one available to him. This phenomenon was examined in a paper given to the 2003 conference on the origins of the Romance Languages in León (Wright Reference Wright, María and Catón2004), using as the main example the third-person present subjunctive forms of the Latin verb SEDERE, traditionally written in the singular as SEDEAT, which had been changing its meaning in the Peninsula from “to be seated” to “to be” (whose infinitive would later be written as ser). In the eleventh-century Riojan Glosses, we find this subjunctive form written as siegat, and used in those glosses with both the semantics and the grammar that it had in contemporary Ibero-Romance (that is, as a passive auxiliary); in this way, it exemplifies the glosser's attempts to write a feature of his natural language in a novel way. This same word appears in many of the documents of the period which are kept now in the archives of León Cathedral; up to the thirteenth century it was always written in the traditionally correct form sedeat, but with the meaning of “be,” including in several uses as a passive auxiliary, and without the original meaning of “is seated.” Thus both the syntax and the semantics of this word in these ostensibly Latinate documents in León are those of Ibero-Romance, as they had been in the Riojan Glosses. When we move ahead a few years to investigate the early thirteenth century, and look at what is probably the first written Romance document produced in either the Leonese or the Castilian chancery, the Treaty of Cabreros of 1206 (both versions are edited in Wright Reference Wright2000), we find that same word (already pronounced [sé-a]) written several times with the letters sea, a three-letter combination which had not been attested in writing in the chanceries before (so far as we can tell). This item is the same entity as the sedeat written in the previous documentation in León (and the siegat of the Glosses), from a semantic and syntactic point of view, and probably also from a phonetic point of view in speech, but written in a new way. Many other words which had undergone semantic changes had their new meaning attested in old graphical form in the época de orígenes as well; thus the eventual change to Romance writing in these cases involved a change to a new spelling only, because the semantic and syntactic entity had been present in writing for a long time already.

This conclusion is unsurprising and indeed only natural; when semantic and syntactic changes occur in a language there is no need to change the language's writing system at all if we wish to represent them on paper, because new word orders and new grammatical and semantic uses for existing words can be represented in writing just as well as the traditional orders and uses can. That is why I called my edition and study of the Treaty of Cabreros a “sociophilological study of an orthographic reform” (i.e. of the existing language) rather than “of a new language.”

The lexicon

Lexical change involves new words, and thus is far more salient to the language user than semantic change is. There can be consequences for the written form, particularly, as already noted, in names of places and people. Words borrowed into Ibero-Romance from Germanic, and even more so from Arabic, often had no obvious written form in the Roman alphabet. Borrowings from Greek had previously led to the adoption in writing of the Greek kappa, and the Greek upsilon and zeta had inspired counterparts in the letters y and z which were added to the end of the Roman alphabet; but that had already happened long before the Ibero-Romance period, and these letters were no longer seen as novelties. Thus the letter z appears in many documents of the época de orígenes, particularly in the names of witnesses (representing the sound [dz]), and the k especially in the dating formula, where kalendas tended to be abbreviated with a k. In the Iberian Peninsula there seem to have been no attempts to transfer Arabic letters into the Roman alphabet to represent unfamiliar sounds heard in the etyma of Arabisms; instead the scribes tried to find suitable Roman alphabet equivalents for the unfamiliar sounds, without notable success in a number of cases, as attested by the multiple spellings of some of the more phonetically complicated lexical items involved. This phenomenon helps our reconstruction of the phonetics, as for example when Arabic words with an initial aspirate [h-] turn up in Latinate or Romance texts with an initial letter f- (e.g. fasta for [hás-ta], modern hasta, [ás-ta]) and thus help us argue that f- in (e.g.) the Poema de Mio Cid often represented [h-].

The presence of originally non-Latinate lexical items in writing is another sign that the scribes were merely aiming to represent their own language on parchment, rather than trying to recreate the Latin of the distant past in which such entities were not yet present. And it happens more often than we might expect that there are apparently non-Latinate lexical items in tenth-century documentation which we cannot now easily recognize or interpret. Two examples: the phrase sagia vizione in a legal judgment from late tenth-century Vairão in the diocese of Porto, which might be used to refer to an ecclesiastical sash with ribbons on (Wright Reference Wright, Lluch and Izquierdo2010c); and the strange word raisce used in several of the documents examined in David Peterson's thoughtful study (Reference Peterson2005) of those documents in the San Millán cartulary which were brought there from the Valle del Alto Tirón in the eleventh century. This is a word which seems from the context to mean a meal held in celebration of a successful transaction, but is etymologically unexplained. There are several others, and in general the scribes saw no reason not to use in writing terms which were current in their own community, whether or not they would count technically as Latin to an admirer of Lewis and Short.

As Steven Dworkin pointed out (Reference Dworkin and González1995), the eventual change to the new Romance writing system involved losing from the written registers a number of old-fashioned words which probably played little role in speech; but the converse is also true, that most of the Romance vocabulary of that time, whatever its etymological origin, had also been attested earlier in ostensibly Latinate documentation. This fact has consequences for the elaboration of etymological dictionaries; there is little validity in Corominas's normal procedure (Corominas and Pascual Reference Corominas and Pascual1980–91) of regarding the earliest attestation of an Old Spanish lexical item as necessarily being its earliest attestation in reformed spelling, since most of the words in question turn up in unreformed spelling before the date given in that dictionary. But they are the same item from an etymological point of view, however they happen to be spelled (see Wright Reference Wright, Deyermond and Conde2010b).

Morphology

Morphology is interesting in the present context, and worth separating out into nominal and verbal morphology. Nominal morphology had slowly but permanently simplified over the years, losing all the original case-endings other than the accusatives from Latin nouns and adjectives, preserving [-s] (and -s) in a new function as a plural marker. Most texts prepared in a non-literary register, during these centuries previous to the development of written Romance, do not attest the ablative cases of nouns, because speech had lost the ablative; and they rarely kept the genitives, datives and (in the Iberian Peninsula) nominatives either. Speech eventually preserved only the originally accusative forms of nouns and adjectives, but the use and the understanding of the nominatives and datives survived in the spoken pronouns, and still do (e.g. ILLE > él, ILLIS > les); and genitives continued to be written throughout the period in a number of proper nouns such as the names of churches (e.g. ecclesia Sanctae Mariae), so it would be an exaggeration to say that the other cases had been dropped from speech. Verbs are slightly different, in that Romance verb morphology, although much evolved, was no simpler than that of Latin. For example, we have already seen the attested spread of the passive auxiliary (< SEDERE), and during these centuries in writing the tense of these passive compounds was often determined by the tense of the auxiliary, as in Romance, rather than that of the participle, as in Latin. Overall, it is reasonable to see the verbal morphology of most non-literary texts of the age as mostly representing that of the speech of the scribe and/or author.

Thus the main difference, between “Latinate” texts of the época de orígenes (that is, written before the advent of the Gregorian and Carolingian reforms) and the subsequent texts in the new Romance writing, lies only in the spellings attempted by the scribe; Romance grammar, vocabulary and semantics were already representable and represented on parchment. The reform of spelling in the Peninsula was preceded and precipitated by a phonetic reform in the nature of the official Latin used in church, and subsequently in the first universities; the official change of rite in Castile and León after 1080 imported the French liturgy and backgrounded the native liturgy which had been elaborated in the seventh century by Isidore of Seville and his colleagues, and brought with it the requirement that in church all texts should be read aloud using the method of giving each written letter of the text a sound, and in theory the same sound each time. Thus most words sounded different in the liturgy from the way they sounded in other circumstances; e.g. episcopus would be pronounced there as [epískopus] rather than [obíspo], and fecit as [fékit] rather than [fídzo]. These developments were an integral part of the Gregorian reforms of the late eleventh century. French clerics were needed to train the native priests in the new techniques (Wright Reference Wright1982, Reference Wright2003; Emiliano 2003 traces the effect of these developments in Portugal). The theoretically biunique connections between each individual written symbol and its related spoken sound, as established at that time in what we now call Medieval Latin, underlay the eventual development of the same correspondences between vernacular sound and letter in the new Romance writing modes. But since contemporary Romance morphology, syntax, vocabulary and semantics could already be, and regularly were, represented up till then in the old writing methods still instilled in scribes during their training, the novelty of such officially inspired texts as the Romance Treaty of Cabreros of 1206, prepared in the Castilian royal chancery with a copy also made in the Leonese chancery, lay almost exclusively in the spellings.

Written Romance, which is what the word “Romance” was initially reserved for at the time, was thus not the sudden eruption of a complete novelty. All aspects of the spoken language other than the phonetic had for a long time already been directly represented on parchment; in exactly the same way, modern English and Spanish grammar, morphology, semantics and vocabulary are written down by us all on paper every day in the traditional spellings which we learned at school, far from being a phonetic script though these are. The newly developed spellings were a new way of writing the same language, rather than a totally new language. That idea, of a new way of writing the same language, had been gestating for a century already. The famous Riojan Glosses of the 1070s have sometimes been described as the “birth certificate” of the Spanish language. This idea is not taken literally any more, but the Glosses certainly attest the birth of something, for they show us the start of a new idea within the scribal mentality: the idea that their words could be deliberately written in a non-traditional way. It seems reasonable to suggest that this idea is a by-product of the new atmosphere which accompanied the arrival of the reforms in the 1070s and 1080s.

The reforms themselves, though, took over a century to become generally operative. The twelfth century in the Peninsula presents a kind of patchwork in this respect, as the reforms were pursued more enthusiastically in some groups (such as the new religious orders) than elsewhere (see Fernández Ordoñez 2011; Hernández 2009; Wright Reference Wright2003: chapter 17). In some places where the reformed technique of reading Medieval Latin aloud was introduced, an incentive to represent vernacular spoken registers on parchment in a novel way, and thence to create a conceptual distinction between Latin and Romance based on the two modes of writing, was likely to follow, though not necessarily at once. But these new written Spanish modes had a prehistory, which Hispanists are well advised to bear continually in mind; in particular, those who study Ibero-Romance grammatical features of the thirteenth century should be aware that they are almost certainly attested in the preceding centuries also, in texts whose graphical form might make them look ostensibly as if they are not Romance at all.

The reasons for the emerging preference for writing in a new Romance style in the early thirteenth century have been much discussed by modern analysts, with no clear consensus emerging. As was probably the case earlier in Carolingian France, there is probably a connection with ease of reading aloud comprehensibly, which had been made a more complex task by the arrival of the new Medieval Latin reading style (which required, and requires, a sound for every written letter). In my view, and that of several others, the monk (or monks) who wrote the glosses of San Millán and Silos was probably writing for his own subsequent benefit (or possibly also the benefit of a foreign visitor) when later reading the texts aloud; but this is not a universally accepted interpretation. What we call Old Occitan (which it would really be more appropriate to call Young Occitan) may well have been a model in the back, or even in the forefront, of the minds of those who tried the initial experiments. Shortly afterwards, the Languedoc certainly seems to have inspired the twelfth-century developments. Hernández's 2009 study pointed out that where scribes were trained is more important for their writing techniques than the place their documents now happen to be kept, which latter assumption underlay most of Menéndez Pidal's organizational rationale in his Documentos Lingüísticos; rearranging the evidence in this way suggests to Hernández that the members of the new religious orders of the age, particularly the Cistercians and the Premonstratensians who had come from the Languedoc, where texts in written Occitan Romance had been known for some decades already, were particularly interested in developing an Ibero-Romance written mode. Geographically, the ensuing patchwork of old and new seems incoherent; in terms of where writers were trained, the pattern makes sense. The result in Burgos, for example, was that the Cistercian nuns at Las Huelgas welcomed the new modes from at least 1188 and the cathedral did not do so until the mid-thirteenth century (Hernández 2009: 267). Aguilar de Campó (where several scribes had Jewish names) adopted the novelties soon after it affiliated to the Premonstratensians in 1169, San Millán did not till well into the following century, and so on. The idea had come from over the Pyrenees, and was continually reinforced by the contacts in both directions between the Peninsular and mother houses, but naturally the details needed to be newly invented in the Peninsula, given the phonetic and other differences between the two varieties of Romance.

In Toledo, local government still mainly used Arabic in written texts in the twelfth century, but towards the end of that century, as knowledge of written Arabic was gradually diminishing, the new written Romance seems to have taken up some of the slack, probably encouraged by the Cistercians who had created the military order of nearby Calatrava (Hernández 2009: 280). None of this seems to have been the result of any political or national perspective; one prime mover may well have been the Archbishop of Toledo, Martín López de Pisuerga, who was granted oversight of the royal chancery by Alfonso VIII of Castile in July 1206, but the arguments between himself and the official chancellor, Diego de Campos (Diego García), who would have preferred to use traditional written Latin consistently, were probably religious and moral in nature rather than political. Diego de Campos was eventually relieved of his duties in 1217, and immediately (1218) produced his extraordinarily reactionary and unsurprisingly little-read Latin work entitled Planeta, in which he expresses the idea that the world is falling to pieces, even implying that the written Latin forms of words have an intrinsic mystical value and that Romance writing, by definition, therefore, is heretical.

As Tore Janson's work has established (Janson Reference Janson2002), the concept of Romance as a separate language from Latin followed the elaboration of the new written mode, rather than inspiring it. Judging by some of the data recently adduced by Fernando Tejedo Herrero (2008), that idea seems to have taken a remarkably long time to take complete hold. The metalinguistic distinction between different Romance languages came later than that between Latin and Romance. For it is clear, from detailed comparative analysis of the two texts of the Treaty of Cabreros of 1206, that although in that context the distinction between written Latin and written Romance must have been obvious to the chancery scribes, and the choice was probably a matter for conscious discussion and argument, there was at that point no real desire or instinct to distinguish metalinguistically between different geographical kinds of written Romance. Their heads had enough to do getting round the promotion of a diastratic register distinction (high style versus low style) to the status of a linguistic one (Medieval Latin versus normal Romance), without doing the same for the diatopic (low style in area x versus low style of area y). That is, there is no sign in the Treaty evidence that the scribes and notaries of the chancery made any clear distinctions in their minds between one geographical kind of Romance and another. This is hardly surprising from a linguistic point of view, since (as Fernández Ordóñez has established and as we would in any event expect) isoglosses did not then bundle neatly along the political frontier between León and Castile; metalinguistically, we have no evidence to support the idea that they made a conceptual distinction yet between Castilian and Leonese as whole dialects. The words castellano and leonés existed, but not with the metalinguistic meaning. The two surviving versions were written by notaries from the chanceries of Castile and León respectively, and show a large number of minor differences that are most easily attributable to their being two different transcriptions taken from the same dictation; but these differences, much more often than not, did not correspond to isoglosses running between León and Burgos. Usually they correspond to two possible ways of spelling the same word within either region (e.g. a versus ha).

Linguistic analysis of the Castilian version of the Treaty and of other Romance texts written in Castile during that decade also shows no consistency in the representation of details; that is, there was no common Castile-wide idea of how to write the Romance of their kingdom. Such consistency as there was tended to operate at the level of the local cultural centre, if at all, not at that of the kingdom as a whole. The idea of writing the Treaty in the new way, and the original preparation of the text, must have come from Castile rather than León. The so-called Posturas of the Cortes of Toledo of January 1207 (Hernández Reference Hernández1988) were prepared in Romance also, as were a few other documents from Toledo at the time (1206–8), including one or two brief fueros (not to mention the Poema de Mio Cid). Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada, however, replaced Martín López de Pisuerga after the latter's death in August 1208, and rehabilitated Chancellor Diego de Campos (as can be seen in the details at the end of the chancery documents of these years). Between them these two forceful personalities and excellent Latinists seem to have discouraged such frivolities as the use of written Romance in the Castilian chancery. Indeed, it is tempting to suggest that this may have been one of the motives for the appointment of Ximénez de Rada in the first place, at precisely the time when the masters in his alma mater, Paris, were expressing hostility to all the novelties coming into France from Toledo, although the fact that he was said to have been elected with the unanimous support of the cathedral chapter may cast doubt on such a hypothesis. In any event, once Fernando III came to the throne in 1217 the writing of Romance texts seems to have slowly come back into political favour in Castile, and then to have been more decisively rehabilitated at an official level after the Council of Valladolid of 1228 (Wright Reference Wright2000; Reference Wright2003: chapter 18). Meanwhile in León, after the Treaty of Cabreros, there is no other surviving Romance text from the chancery until after the union of the two kingdoms under Fernando III in 1230. It is striking to note that there is a document from the Leonese chancery, dated September 1207, which refers extensively to the stipulations of the Treaty of Cabreros of the previous year, but which was written once again in the traditional Latinate mode (other than the many toponyms, most of which are spelled there in the same obviously non-Latin way as they were in the Treaty; see Wright Reference Wright and González2010a).

Written Romance was being developed in Castile as an occasional proper medium for legal texts throughout the first half of the thirteenth century, a development which was accelerated in the 1240s, when many monastic and other centres saw a marked rise in the proportion of documents transacted in Romance. This change of taste may well have been connected with the spread of fueros. The first fueros were in Latin, such as the highly influential Fuero de Cuenca of c.1190 (Powers Reference Powers2000). But some brief ones were being redacted in Romance in New Castile already in the early 1200s, and the general view now among scholars is that this choice was connected with their nature as public documents to be read aloud intelligibly to a wide audience, rather than private texts to be read in a monastic cell, for which the traditional Latin mode was not only more appropriate but actually easier to follow than the new written Romance, for those who had learned to read Latin. New Castile seems to have been the main area for these novelties. The Fuero de Madrid, which was elaborated in several stages, has both Latin and Romance sections; the long Fuero de Alcalá de Henares (Torrens Álvarez Reference Torrens Álvarez2002) shows that if the notaries wished to write lengthy texts in the new mode in the first half of the thirteenth century, they could. Henrique Monteagudo's study (Reference Monteagudo2008) of the Foral (fuero) of Burgo de Caldelas in Galicia shows that the idea was also finding favour there in 1228. The Leonese were less keen to change the written mode in this way, and were to continue to be so; in the second half of that century, Gil de Zamora wrote in Latin, which he probably thought was more respectable than Romance, with the result that almost no modern scholar reads his work.

It has been traditional to see Alfonso X as the crucial figure in the development of written Castilian Romance. As Pedro Sánchez-Prieto Borja (e.g. Reference Sánchez-Prieto Borja and Cano2004) and others (including Torrens, Harris-Northall Reference Harris-Northall, Corfis and Harris-Northall2007 and myself) have been arguing, this downplays the role of those who worked out how to represent Romance in writing in the first half of the thirteenth century. But it still seems viable to see Alfonso X as the one who brought in the political, nationalistic and metalinguistic dimension which has characterized inter-Romance rivalry in the Peninsula ever since. Before his time, the arguments, including those between Martín López and Diego García (Diego de Campos) in the Castilian chancery at the start of that century, seem to have been practical, rather than nationalistic. But in the 1240s, when many of the intellectual protagonists of the first half of the century (including Ximénez de Rada) died, the pendulum suddenly swung to the benefit of those who preferred to write in Romance. Berceo, the skilled Latin notary who always said he wrote his verse in romanz (or romance) rather than any geographically more restricted mode of Romance, had started his second career as a writer of McGonagallesque verse in Romance after, and perhaps as a result of, the Council of Valladolid of 1228. At first he must have seemed somewhat eccentric; by the time of his death in the 1250s, his genre, the four-line stanzaic mester de clerecía, was becoming something of a cliché.

It is plausible to attribute the startling metalinguistic success of Romance in Castile, and then its reconceptualized mode as Castilian Romance (romance castellano), to the support given to it by Alfonso X even before he ascended the throne in 1252. He was active both intellectually and in practical, including military, matters before then, and his attitudes are likely to have catalyzed the general shift to Romance documentation in many literate centers during the 1240s. His father, Fernando III, had decreed that the Fuero given to Córdoba in 1241 should be translated into Romance (in vulgarem), although so far as we can tell this did not actually happen until Alfonso's reign. Alfonso's interest in harmonizing, as far as he could, the legal systems in his expanding realms started in the 1240s (if not before), and his collaborators collected together fueros from several areas, probably in both Romance and Latin, which became synthesized in his Fuero Real of 1255–6. The use of written Romance in such an authoritative text, guaranteeing its validity even in legal documentation, can be seen now, and probably also was then, as a definitive indication of the status of Romance as a separate language from Latin. Such a sociolinguistic change needs official blessing and prestige, and the use of written Romance in the chancery and the law gave it that.

The idea that there was a specifically Castilian Romance followed this soon afterwards. Berceo never seems to have bothered to decide what geographical kind of Romance he was writing (which is why it is anachronistic to refer to him as writing in Castilian). Alfonso's choice of Romance for the written works produced at court was initially conceptualized as the alternative to Latin, as a part of the avant-garde zeitgeist, but since the linguistic details corresponded more often than not to features found on the eastern side of any isoglosses which ran north to south in the Leonese and Castilian realms, Leonese elements were downplayed, often, probably, intentionally. There had been identifiably Leonese documentation in the central years of the thirteenth century, but there was no political need to use more than one Romance written mode at court, and written Leonese gradually lost political prestige and practical value (Morala Reference Morala and Cano2004). In the 1270s, Alfonso also helped establish written Galician as a separate respectable entity through his own use of it for poetic compositions of a broadly “lyrical” nature, allying the choice of language with choice of genre, but in Castile romance castellano was always the one with the political prestige. Alfonso wanted Castile to have prestige on an international level, as evidenced in his pursuit of the imperial throne, and the language was part of this project. Politics, in the writing of castellano, had thus taken over from the initially specifically linguistic purpose of writing Romance (which was, in particular, to aid reading aloud).

Meanwhile, Portuguese and Galician were acquiring separate metalinguistic identities as a result of Portugal and Galicia having become separate political entities during the twelfth century; and the Catalans, happy to write in a Romance mode based on Provençal features in the twelfth century, developed their own independent written form once the Battle of Muret in 1213 had definitively separated Provence and Catalonia politically. Thus the independent written modes, on which conceptually distinct Ibero-Romance languages were based, were allied closely to independent political units, and each kingdom wanted to be able to claim its own language; by the fourteenth century, they were able to do so.

Language and empire

It is not easy to unravel the intricate historiographical traditions that reproduce inherited, and often unquestioned, critical topoi about the relations between language and empire in early modern Spain. Two main events of a somewhat anecdotal character, however, have structured the narratives of Spanish as a triumphant imperial language that suddenly acquired political currency and international prestige in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Nebrija's (1441–1522) publication of allegedly the first European vernacular grammar and Charles V's Castilian speech in Rome in 1536 have indeed constituted for years the two milestones of an imperial discourse on the Spanish language that has found complex ways to survive until the present. Let us start, therefore, by taking a quick look at these two climactic moments of the plot.

Nebrija's Gramática de la lengua castellana, published in 1492, has often been regarded as the foundational moment of this monumental narrative of global expansion for the Spanish language, destined, inevitably and providentially, to become the universal language of a universal empire. Although the scholarly production on Nebrija is extremely rich and diverse, some of the key axioms of the argument that interests us here, as it occurs in many other intellectual debates regarding Spain's cultural history, were influentially postulated by Ramón Menéndez Pidal: “the first grammar of a romance language to be produced in the Europe of humanism was written in the certain hope of the New World [en la esperanza cierta del Nuevo Mundo], although no one had sailed to discover it yet” (Menéndez Pidal Reference Menéndez Pidal1933:11). The tellingly paradoxical nature of this idea will be found in many histories of the language, as Nebrija is often characterized as a humanist among barbarians or as a visionary whose linguistic ideas about the peninsular and global victory of Spanish predated the actual events.

Nebrija's prologue to his work is certainly one of the most interesting formulations of the relation between language and political power ever to be made in the early modern age, and his famous dictum – language was always the companion of empire [siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio] – has been the object of intense scholarly discussion.¹ What is rarely taken into consideration in the scholarship on Nebrija's ideas about the relationship between language and empire, however, is the fact that they had almost no traceable repercussion among his contemporaries and alleged inheritors. After its first edition of 1492 in Salamanca, Nebrija's Gramática would never be reprinted until the eighteenth century.² Although recognized by many scholars, the objective limits of such an exiguous material distribution of Nebrija's ideas about language and empire have usually been ignored, and the grammarian's absolutely central position both in the historical metalinguistic corpus on Spanish and in the narratives about its triumph has been continuously and unproblematically reasserted.

Juan de Valdés (d. 1541), another pillar of Golden Age discourse on language according to literary and linguistic historiography, mocked Nebrija precisely because his grammar, which he boasts not to have read, “was printed only once” (Valdés Reference Valdés and Laplana2010: 156). The scant editorial history of the first European vernacular grammar is even more shocking if we consider the extraordinary success enjoyed by the other Latin works of the lebrixano, certainly among the most widely used in Spanish and European universities and schools during the sixteenth century.³ The Castilian Valdés, however, was in no position to scorn the Andalusian Nebrija and the relative failure of his pioneering work on the Spanish vernacular. Despite the enthusiasm about the Diálogo de la lengua shown by one of the characters, Marcio, who intends to “give it to everyone…and maybe print it” (273), Valdés's work would not be published until the eighteenth century, and its circulation in the sixteenth century was very limited.⁴ If we are to resituate the debate about imperial Spanish, it is crucial to emphasize the meager material circulation of these two works, which calls into question their place as milestones in the story of the ineludible and providential triumph of Castilian that interpretations of both Nebrija and Valdés have, more than anything else, contributed to design.

1492, however, is not the only annus mirabilis to be found in this story of unfailing success. In 1536, after having defeated the Turk in the walls of Tunis in the summer of 1535, Charles V marched through the streets of Rome as a true and victorious Roman emperor. On April 17, Charles V delivered one of his most famous speeches in front of Paul III's pontifical court, the cardinals and the European ambassadors that populated the Vatican's Sala dei Paramenti.⁵ The emperor's address was motivated by Francis I's attack on the imperial fiefdom of Savoy earlier that year, which would eventually lead to a new cycle of hostilities, reviving the never-ending conflict over northern Italy between the Habsburgs and the Valois. The urgency of the new political crisis in Italy would have led Charles to speak spontaneously, without consulting with his more intimate counselors, and aggressively targeting the French ambassadors Claude Dodieu de Vély and Charles Hémard de Dénonville, bishop of Mâcon.

What appears to have surprised French and Italians alike, beyond the chivalric desafío (challenge) that a visibly angry Charles launched upon the person of the French king, was the fact that this most famous speech was delivered in Spanish. The event has been repeatedly recorded by political and linguistic historiography as the birth certificate of the international currency of Spanish as a “universal language,” a phrase to be found in the title of at least four twentieth-century accounts of the episode.⁶ The anecdote was undoubtedly popularized, again, by Menéndez Pidal, who recorded it both in El lenguaje del siglo XVI (1933: 35) and in Idea imperial de Carlos V, a lecture originally delivered in Havana in 1937 and later included in his book of the same title (1941: 30–1). This last essay was the source of García Blanco, who reproduced the story in El español en la época de Carlos V (1958), and finally Lapesa's Historia de la lengua española, in the same vein as his predecessors, offered an account that would become standard in many ways (1980: 296–7).

However, the ultimate origin of this crucial episode in the early modern history of Spanish is an informative and richly nuanced article by Alfred Morel-Fatio published in 1913, in which he offers a varied and conflicting array of testimonies about Charles V's celebrated speech of Easter Monday. The documentary complexity of Morel-Fatio's influential essay, however, is dramatically simplified in later accounts by Spanish scholars. According to some of the extant evidence, one of the French ambassadors, the bishop of Mâcon, would have reacted angrily to Charles of Gante's unexpected language choice. His complaint to both the emperor and the pope would have not stopped the former from finishing his address in Spanish.

According to the always controversial and colorfully literary version of the Seigneur de Brantôme's Rodomontades espagnoles – taken from Morel-Fatio by Menéndez Pidal and then reproduced to exhaustion by later linguistic historians – the emperor responded proudly to the French ambassador: “Bishop, please understand me if you want, and do not expect from me any words other than in my Spanish language, which is so noble that it deserves to be known and understood by all Christiandom” (qtd. in Morel-Fatio Reference Morel-Fatio1913: 217). The praise of the universality and nobility of Spanish in the haughty words of the emperor is only to be found in Brantôme's collection of stories and apothegms about the bravery and the arrogance of the Spanish character written many years after the events recounted, but they fit perfectly in standard historical narratives about both the progressive hispanization of the once French-speaking emperor and the international triumph of the language. “Thus,” concludes Lapesa, “Spanish was proclaimed an international language” (1980: 297). The words certifying the universal condition that Castilian would have almost miraculously acquired by virtue of Charles's speech are not recorded or even hinted at in any of the other, more reliable documents provided and evaluated by Morel-Fatio.⁷

One of them, in fact, provides a justification for the use of Spanish by Charles that has little to do with the glories of its imperial destiny. The renowned humanist historian Paolo Giovio, who was part of Paulo III's entourage on that Easter Monday (Zimmermann Reference Zimmermann1995: 146–7), assures the reader, in his celebrated Historiarum sui temporis, that “The emperor said that he would speak in Spanish so that more people could understand him in a language so close to Latin” (qtd. in Morel-Fatio Reference Morel-Fatio1913: 216). The Emperor's justification of his language choice does not obey any kind of Spanish imperial or national pride – “pour bravade et ostentation, pour honorer mieux sa langue,” as Morel-Fatio said (217–18) – but rather the social (or sociolinguistic) logic of the specific local setting in which the famous scene occurred.⁸ Charles I did not give up his native language, French, because he was consciously staging a performance of his newly acquired Spanish imperial identity, but because of his entourage's belief that Spanish was easier to understand for a mainly Italian- and Latin-speaking audience – neither of which languages he was able to speak fluently. Rather than the sudden awakening of a national linguistic consciousness that would have immediately bestowed universality upon the language, as the narratives of imperial Spanish have imagined for this iconic moment, it is the often heteroglossic linguistic culture of international politics in the highly local context of the Roman court that helps us to better explain the emperor's linguistic behavior.

In order to understand why the historiographical narratives of imperial Spanish have conferred such a great deal of symbolism upon these two moments of Iberian early modernity we have to set them against the backdrop of the sociolinguistic and political articulation of the Iberian Peninsula in the period. What was really at stake when tracing the enthusiastic genealogy of the imperial triumph of Spanish was the question of its status within the peninsular territory. Historians of language have consistently and explicitly linked both Nebrija's grammar and the emperor's Roman speech – while ignoring the limited material history of Nebrija's grammar and providing a drastically partial reading of the Easter Monday episode – to the transformation of Spanish into the national language within Spain. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most important source of this argument, which has become ingrained in the historiography of early modern Spanish, is again to be found in Menéndez Pidal: “Nebrija's grammar thus evokes ideas about the fixation and expansion of the language, and seeks the first solution to the linguistic problem of the Iberian Peninsula” (1933: 12). The linguistic problem of the Iberian Peninsula is, again unsurprisingly, its intrinsic diversity, which is conceived as a difficulty that Nebrija's and Charles's imperial Spanish would help to overcome, as Menéndez Pidal promised to show in the rest of his essay.⁹ For Lapesa, that “Spanish had been proclaimed an international language” by virtue of the imperial speech in Rome, and the “undeniable fact” that “Castilian had become the national language” by the sixteenth century, were intimately related facts: “the Hispanic community had a language,” he concluded in characteristically Pidalian idiom (1980: 297–8). In modern scientific discourse on language, the universality of Spanish in the wake of Nebrija's foundational work and after the newly hispanicized emperor consecrated it in Rome is closely associated with a narrative of linguistic homogenization within the Iberian Peninsula at the expense of competing vernaculars.

Language and nation

For many historians of language, Nebrija's Gramática is an icon of the unitary language that Tony Crowley has theorized building on Bakhtinian ideas of monologism and dialogism. Grammatical standardization of vernacular varieties is often considered to serve the “formal unity” and thus the “cultural unity” of a given political community. Nebrija's discourse, however, would hardly have taken part in the “massive centralizing forces overcoming heteroglot differences”: the metanarrative situating the origin of the “historical process of linguistic unification and centralization” (Crowley Reference Crowley, Hirschkop and Shepherd1989: 74) in the Gramática castellana is ultimately flawed by the limits of its material circulation.

It is also revealing that the social and territorial distribution of early modern works on Spanish language appears to be unrelated to Nebrija's text. There is no vernacular grammatical reflection in Salamanca or Seville, for instance, as might be expected from the legacy of such an influential master, nor is there any in the most important centers of Castilian political and cultural activity, such as Toledo, Valladolid or Madrid. If we start to trace the material production, distribution and reception of early modern metalinguistic discourse on Spanish, what we find is a network of European cities, mainly Italian and Flemish, associated with the geography of Habsburg imperial power, but far from any concerns about the linguistic heterogeneity of the Spanish kingdoms.

Valdés's Diálogo de la lengua, undoubtedly a minor work in the career of a humanist known and followed for his religious thinking and practice, was written in viceregal Naples in the context of the emperor's sojourn in the city after the conquest of Tunis, from the last months of 1535 to the beginnings of 1536. While composing his dialogue, Valdés must have had in mind those Italian ladies and gentlemen of the imperial court who were in the orbit of the Habsburg power (Valdés Reference Valdés and Laplana2010: 115). Decades later, Mattia Cancer would also print in Naples Giovanni Mario Alessandri d’Urbino's Il paragone della lingua toscana et castigliana (1560), which influenced another well-known Spanish textbook for an Italian audience, Giovanni Miranda's Osservationi della lingua castigliana (1998/1566), published by Giolito's Venetian workshop, where important cultural mediators such as Francisco Delicado and Alfonso de Ulloa worked for a while. Two of the most often cited Spanish grammars of the sixteenth century – the Vtil y breve institvtión para aprender los principios y fundamentos de la lengua Española (1555) and the Gramática de la lengua vulgar de España (1559) – were published by the printer Bartholomaeus Gravius in the city of Louvain, a vibrant, multilingual humanistic capital with a thriving book market linked to the university that held intense debates over the religious legitimacy of vernacular scriptures. Antwerp, popularly known as “the world's market” [la plaça del mundo] because of its economic, political and cultural centrality in northern Europe, and a supplier of printed matter to the imperial court of Brussels, gave birth not only to Cristóbal de Villalón's Gramática castellana (printed by Guillaume Simon in 1558), but also to Bachiller Thámara's Suma y erudición de grammatica en metro castellano (printed by Martinus Nutius in 1550) and Gabriel Meurier's Conjugaisons, regles, et instructions…pour ceux qui desirent apprendre François, Italian, Espagnol et Flamen (printed by J. van Waesberghe in 1558).

This provisional editorial geography points to the fact that, at least during a significant part of the sixteenth century, it was the practical demands of courtly practice, commercial exchange, the printing industry and imperial administration that made possible the emergence of a corpus of vernacular works on the Spanish language. While living in the Flemish heart of the Habsburg Netherlands, Benito Arias Montano made reference to the people who needed to learn Castilian “both for public matters and for trade” [ansí para las cosas públicas como para la contratación] (Lapesa 1980: 293). The grammatical systematization of the Spanish language does not seem to derive from a preoccupation about the linguistic homogenization of the Peninsula, as has often been assumed by the proponents of Nebrija's imperial Spanish. It is not a desire to expand the uses and domains of Spanish within the Iberian Peninsula that helps us explain the emergence of this new discursive formation around language. It is rather the “practice of the empire,” in Koenigsberger's words, “the detailed work of…imperial administration” (1951: 40), the specific administrative procedures, institutional settings, territorial and intellectual networks and social spaces required by the European imperial apparatuses of the “composite monarchy” of the Spanish Habsburgs that generates most of Renaissance discourse on language (Elliott Reference Elliott1992).¹⁰

The production of a specialized discourse devoted to the pedagogical systematization and elaboration of Spanish is inextricably linked to certain nodes of imperial power and to a multiplicity of practices and social spaces that are impossible to reduce to the unitarian and centralizing drive of grammatical discourse as it has been understood by linguistic scholarship since the twentieth century. Despite the fact that some of the linguistic works listed above are frequently invoked as decisive milestones in the historical path leading to the necessary triumph of Spanish in the world and within the Iberian Peninsula, it is not at all clear that they would have aimed at disciplining the linguistic and literary practices of such a diverse and conflicted cultural territory as the Iberian Peninsula in favor of Castilian. In fact, many of these texts clearly problematize the Spanish triumph of Spanish, the narrative of internal linguistic homogenization that would naturally follow the imperial expansion of the language.¹¹

The authors of the two anonymous Lovaina grammars open their works with extremely nuanced reflections about the linguistic complexity of the peninsular territory and with hesitant remarks about the very name that should be given to the variety they attempt to systematize. The often quoted prologue to the trilingual (Latin, French and Spanish) Vtil y breve institvtion (1555) starts by claiming that “this language for which we will give precepts here is called Spanish, not because in all of Spain only one language is spoken, common to all its inhabitants, since there are many other languages, but because most of Spain uses it.…Certainly this language should properly be called Castilian, since it belongs to the nation they call Castile, which the ancient Romans named Hispania Tarraconense” (Aii–v).¹²

Much more complex is the political and social linguistic distribution of the Iberian Peninsula traced by the second Lovaina grammar, Gramática de la lengua vulgar de España (1559). After stating that “nowadays four languages are spoken in all of Spain, very different from each other,” the anonymous author enumerates Basque, “the oldest language of all”; Arabic, “in which many good Spaniards have written” and still “spoken in the kingdom of Granada”; Catalan, which being “spoken in the kingdoms of Catalonia, Valencia, Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, Sardinia and even in Naples,” contains “the best and subtlest books in prose and verse that have ever been written in Spain”; and, finally, “that which I newly call Vernacular Language of Spain, because it is broadly spoken and understood in all of it.” Portuguese would later be added to the count. The same uncertainty about the name to be given to the language today known as Spanish underlies the metalinguistic discourse of the second Lovaina: “The language I name vulgar, some called Spanish, which seems wrong to me, since we see that in Spain there is more than one language…Others named it Castilian…which, although it does not seem utterly inappropriate, is still an overambitious name, and full of envy, since it is as clear as the sunlight that the kingdoms of León and Aragon have a better right to the vulgar language than the kingdom of Castile itself” (Gramática de la lengua vulgar de España: 6–8).

None of these well-known testimonies about the making of the Spanish language, however, accounts for the defeat of the other peninsular languages. On the contrary, they insist on the linguistic complexity of a politically complex territory and on the instability of the relationship between language and nation during the early modern period. In Machiavelli's The Prince (1532), one of the constitutive discourses of political modernity, this shifty relation between language, territory and the body politic is also made clear: “I say, then, that the territories a conqueror annexes and joins to his own well-established state are either in the same country [provincia], with the same language, or they are not” (1988: 8). Early in Machiavelli's pioneering work language appears at first to be inextricably associated with a territory as one of the key elements that would constitute a distinctive political community (Elliott Reference Elliott1992: 52). The relation between language and nation, however, is not always as stable as this first distinction might suggest. If the principalities to be acquired by the new prince are of the same language, they will be easy to hold, “provided their old way of life is maintained and there is no difference in customs.” This last qualification immediately decenters the importance of common language by emphasizing the relevance that political institutions, customs, and the fact of being used to “governing themselves” – the Republican libertà – have in the constitution of principalities and states. For one of the groundbreaking thinkers of the increasingly complex political world of Renaissance Europe, language will have varying degrees of influence in the conceptualization of nations and in the determination of imperial expansionist political practice. Just as the material geography sketched above has provided us with a productive framework to explore the imperial context of metalinguistic reflection, Machiavelli's complex discursive articulation of language, nation and empire will help us consider the relevance that the different conceptualizations of empire may potentially have for our understanding of the relation between language and nation within the Iberian Peninsula.

There is no doubt that language, according to a phrase that had been already used by Nebrija, belongs in “the things of the nation” (las cosas de la nación), which would also include customs, political institutions, laws, ancient and local history, and poetry or literature, among other assets. The emergence of an increasingly self-assured discourse in praise of the Romance vernaculars is directly related to the European humanistic debates around the question of language, particularly intense in the Iberian case. Defenses or praises of the native language proliferated in Italy, France, England, Spain and Portugal, and usually posed the explicitly contending nature of their claims to supremacy in terms that are difficult to separate from national anxieties regarding the relative status of their vernaculars in the global context.¹³ Renaissance translators, on their part, often conceived of vernacularization of Latin classics, as well as the translation of foreign literary works into the national language, as an enriching activity that would serve to accumulate literary capital for both the native language and the nation (Casanova Reference Casanova2007). Literary controversies such as those around the purity and property of Garcilaso's lyric language in the sixteenth century, or over Góngora's audacious poetic innovations in the seventeenth, were repeatedly and unequivocally associated to an emerging discursive formation around the “things of the nation.” Finally, Woolard has persuasively argued, against one of the axioms of the modernist history of nationalism, that “the construct of nation as a natural and venerable political community was not only available to competing elites but was being used as a strategic tool in public debates in early modern Spain,” as in the language quarrel between Bernardo de Aldrete and Gregorio López Madera that she has meticulously reconstructed (Woolard Reference Woolard2004: 75; see also Woolard in this volume).

The difficulty lies, however, in determining the nature of this belonging of language to the nation's cultural capital, that is to say, to what extent the emerging discursive formation on the nation is able to condition specific linguistic practices, outweighing the determining force of other possible associations such as those of language and local social space, language and cultural praxis, and language and political constitution. The fact that much of the discourse produced in Portugal and Catalonia that was decidedly contributing to the things of the nation, including learned historiography, antiquarian history, chorography, literary criticism, documentary collections, and juridical treatises, was often written in Castilian reveals the complexity and obliqueness of the relation between the discursive construction of the national cultural archive and the instrumental language in which that archive would be built.

Let us focus on two instances of a discursive gesture that is characteristic of the nation's textual production in Portugal and Catalonia during the early modern period. In 1630, Antonio de Sousa e Macedo felt the necessity to explain the title he gave to his miscellany on the glories of Portuguese history and their complicated relation to things Spanish: “Some may say that despite the title of my book being Flores de España, excelencias de Portugal, I deal only with Portugal, and not with any of the other kingdoms of Spain, and thus the title would not agree with the matter, and that the name of Flores de España could just be removed. To this I answer that, Portugal being such an important part of Spain, by writing the Excellencies of this kingdom I no doubt write Flores de España” (1630: *iv-r). The contrast between the Portuguese pride of an author that would eventually become one of the leading intellectual architects of the Restoration in 1640 and his choice of Castilian as the instrumental language for his work on the things of the nation might strike us as paradoxical or contradictory. But Sousa e Macedo offers an imperial argument for the defense of his national endeavor: “I excuse myself by saying that I do not give up the Portuguese language because I consider it to be inferior…Yet since my love of the motherland [patria] incites me to publish its excellencies throughout the whole world, I thought it better to use the Castilian language, which happened to be better known [acertó ser más conocida] in Europe than the Portuguese language” (1630: 267).

The imperial logic of local historical writing may reach new levels of complexity in the case of the Catalan-speaking territories. In the dedication of Descripcion de las excellencias de la mvy insigne civdad de Barcelona (1589) to the consellers of the same city, Dionisio de Iorba apologizes for having his work translated first into Latin and then into Castilian, “alien language” [lengua estraña], despite having originally written it in his native Catalan, “which I have not done for contempt towards our language…but because I fondly desire that the matters of this most illustrious and most noble city be as well known as they are heroic and noteworthy. I have therefore begged my friend to bring these matters to light in Castilian, a language so well known among the Spaniards themselves, the Italians and the French, and so spread among the other Eastern and Western nations that, making exception of Latin, no other language has been so extended” (1589: A1r–A2v).

The argument should not strike us as contradictory or exceptional: it became so generalized that even works written in Catalan resorted to it. In the preface to his Summari, Index o Epitome dels admirables y nobilissims titols d’Honor de Catalunya, Rosselló y Cerdanya (1628), the Catalan historian Andreu Bosc assumes that “since this work contains our praises, it would have been better to write it in one of those common languages [Latin or Castilian], in order to make them known to strange and remote nations” (1628: Proemi fol. 4). Bosc, thus, justifies the “reasons that have obliged me to write not in Latin or Castilian, though more common, but in our mother tongue” by addressing his work to a local audience which he claims is unaware of the titles and honors of the land. Local chorography and antiquarian history are especially urgent in light of the wider scholarly interest in what Bosc considers to be the alien history of empire: “Does not everyone know how badly this land needs them [praises of the nation's history] today, since the most erudite and knowledgeable only care about the histories, deeds and actions of the discovery of the New World, the states of China, the wars of Flanders, Italy, and the successions, exploits and feats of foreign nations and kings, and when they are asked about their nation's they can say they come from the Indies to know those of others? [quant los demanen les de llur casa poden dir que venen de les Indies a saber les dels altres]” (1628: Proemi fol. 4; partially qtd. in Torrent Reference Torrent1989: 35). The tension between nation and empire, between Catalan local glories and the expansionist accomplishments of Castile, could not be clearer.¹⁴

In these cases, which we might characterize as strategic pragmatism, it is certainly the imperial reach of Spanish, rather than its pan-Iberian dimension supposedly derived from its triumph over other vernaculars, that appears to give support to most of the excusationes of those who, not having Spanish as their first language, use it to write about the things of their nation. The choice by Catalan or Portuguese authors of a medium alien to their “language, customs and institutions” is never justified in terms of the greater richness or intrinsic superiority of Spanish over their native tongues, but, in the words of Sousa e Macedo, because “it happened to be better known.” The periphrastic construction, also characteristic of these justifications, implicitly negates any kind of providential design in the expansion of Spanish. Duarte Nunes de Leão, on his part, thought that “the wider spread of one language over another is not a proof of its superiority” (Monteagudo Reference Monteagudo1999: 191). If, on the one hand, the imperial institutional spaces and networks of the Habsburg composite monarchy had provided the material basis for these hegemonic uses of Castilian, on the other it would be those same imperial structures that would allow the broader distribution of the flowers and excellencies of non-Castilian peninsular nations, especially in the context of open political confrontation.

Spanish nationalist historiography has always found the production of Castilian written matter in Portuguese- and Catalan-speaking domains to be an unmistakable sign of the Spanish political hegemony and local social currency (Lapesa 1980: 298–9). Portuguese and Catalan nationalist historiographies, on their part, have often been disturbed by what is seen as a constitutive contradiction between national and linguistic consciousness, a conflict that is usually framed by the paradigms of decadence and Castilianization that have informed the standard political narratives about their languages during the dark centuries.¹⁵

A political history of Spanish vis-à-vis the other peninsular languages during the early modern age is necessarily messier. The actual political and social valences of language choice and usage do not always correspond with explicit discursive representations of the relationship between language and the nation. This is especially true for the periods of most intense political conflict between the peninsular kingdoms. Despite the force of the discourse of Portuguese humanists in defense of their vernacular (Stegagno Picchio Reference Stegagno Picchio1982), it has been shown that the bulk of the Portuguese political satire opposing Philip II's claim to Portugal's throne in the succession crisis before Philip II's invasion in 1580 was written in Castilian (Martínez-Torrejón Reference Martínez-Torrejón2002). The Courts of Tomar's constitutional arrangements between the kingdom of Portugal and its new king stated clearly that Portuguese was the only language to be used for interlocution between the Spanish king's officials and their Portuguese counterparts, yet the intensified human and material traffic across the peninsular border after the aggregation would inevitably result in an increase in the use of Spanish by Portuguese authors residing in Madrid, and of Castilian printing in Lisbon's workshops.

Marfany has argued, against traditional Catalan linguistic historiography, that, much as in Habsburg Portugal, it was precisely the constitutional arrangements of the kingdom and the specificity of its institutional relationship with the monarchy that helped to deter the advance of Spanish.¹⁶ Anna Maria Torrent reminded us of the fact that whereas many of the anti-Castilian political pamphlets of the Catalan revolt in 1640 were also written in Spanish, because that allowed a wider distribution, the relacions and gacetas meant to inform the native population about the ongoing war against the Castilian enemy were printed in Catalan. While the fight for the liberties of the kingdom was not incompatible with the use of the enemy's language for political struggle, the vitality of the Catalan popular printing industry requires us to question both the narratives of the total victory of Spanish and those of the decadència of a language that undoubtedly continued to be the only one for most social groups in most social settings in the Catalan domains (Marfany Reference Marfany2008: 85–106).

At the same time that they insist on the emergence of a specialized discourse around the things of the nation, all these contrasts problematize the automatic association based on metonymical contiguity or iconic representation between language and nation. My argument, thus, does not aim at strengthening or severing the link between language and nation, but at formulating a more complex, changing and problematic interaction between the two terms, one also inevitably mediated by the workings of empire. A political history of language and linguistic practices within the Iberian Peninsula must take into account the diversity of discourses and representations available when talking about language, the diverging views of the relation between language and power, and the multiple rationalizations of opposing linguistic practices.

Between the local and the global: for a connected history of Spanish in the early modern age

Scholars in the sociology of language, language policy and linguistic ideologies have long argued for a politically and socially informed understanding of linguistic phenomena (see Del Valle's Chapter 1). Despite efforts to bring the historical study of language closer to what Bourdieu calls the “world of practice,” Spanish linguistic historiography on the imperial age has remained for the most part trapped in an overall narrative of success whose teleological underpinnings are easily undermined by detailed reference to the very same sources that served to document its main episodes, a narrative that reproduces, not always consciously, the discursive dead ends of a few nationalist and imperialist topoi.

The different hierarchies and configurations of the relationship between language, nation and empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries entail diverse and conflicting representations of language that are irreducible to one single unifying narrative, be it the inevitable triumph of imperial Spanish, the linguistic homogenization of the Iberian Peninsula, the Castilianization of the periphery, or the decadent dark ages of other peninsular languages. A political history of Spanish, or a history of its representational politics consistent with the project embraced by the present book, should not seek to delineate a totalizing story that would most likely end up erasing precisely the struggle of representations and the specificity of the linguistic practices associated with the many different social spaces engendering and being shaped by those representations, which is what we should attempt to recover.

Empire and nation were rarely used as unmediated categories to describe actual political bodies. Yet they are working, even structuring, concepts of the early modern discourses on language, and they do pervade, in one way or another, every piece of metalinguistic reflection written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But these national or imperial linguistic representations are always associated with concrete social contexts – the local governing institutions and constitutional arrangements of the kingdom of Portugal or the crown of Aragon, the spaces and networks of the printing industry and their geographic and economic logic, the international courts serving as centers of imperial administration, or the humanist circles producing local historiography within specific cultural traditions – that necessarily limit their reach and mediate their meaning, a fact that the metanarratives based upon those concepts more often than not tend to ignore. In order to recover the nuanced political logic of linguistic representations in the early modern age it is crucial to turn to the social constitution of the local spaces where those representations originated and to the material mechanisms that made possible their distribution, appropriation and use by different, and often conflicting, social groups and communities.

The main problem that Crowley identified in Bakhtin's otherwise invigorating account of the history of language was precisely “the lack of historical specificity” (1989: 74) and the failure to identify particular sites of conflict and representational struggle: “The particular situation in which a representation is to be deployed dictates the form of the representation” (75–6). Gabrielle Spiegel's programmatic recovery of “the social logic of the text” might be in order for a project concerned with the exploration of specific metalinguistic corpora and with the political history of language representation:

This is precisely what scholars working on the history of Catalan and Spanish in the early modern age such as Joan-Lluís Marfany and Kathryn Woolard – in this volume – have started to do masterfully. The main challenge that this program confronts when applied to the study of Spanish linguistic practices and representations of the period is that the local contexts of their deployment are in many senses inflected by the global dimension of the empire. To explore the role that specific booksellers and printing institutions played in the spread and consolidation of particular linguistic varieties entails the consideration of the dynamics of both local and global book markets; to study humanist discourse and representations of language requires us to take into account the international material networks of intellectual exchange; to study the operating logic and linguistic practices that take place at specific local institutions and social sites in different territories of the empire, we need to consider how those spaces were related to the broader polysynodal, polycentric and composite political articulation of the Monarchy of Spain. Rather than arguing for a total history of Spanish against which much of the present essay – and the present volume – has contended, it might be useful to think of it as a connected history in the sense that Subrahmanyam and other scholars on early modern empires have proposed, encouraging us “[not] to take the geographical units as given from the conventional wisdom, and then proceed to a higher level of comparison using these very units as building-blocks,” and to answer instead, “How might the local and specific have interacted with the supra-local in our terms?” (1997: 743, 745).

The story of the Portuguese writer Francisco Manuel de Melo (1608–1666) could not be more instructive in this respect. On the outbreak of the Catalan revolt in 1640, because of his military experience in Flanders and his intellectual renown in Madrid he was appointed to accompany the Marquis of Velez to fight the rebels and to write the history of the war, which he eventually did in his celebrated Historia de los movimientos y separación de Cataluña (Melo Reference Melo and Tobella1996), first published in Lisbon in 1645 by Paulo Craesbeck. After the December 1st events in Lisbon, however, Melo fell under suspicion of having collaborated in some way with the Portuguese uprising and was taken to Madrid as a prisoner. He was soon released and sent back to the Low Countries as a high-ranking military officer, but during his voyage he ended up siding with the newly acclaimed João IV and fleeing to London, where he carried out important diplomatic negotiations. Back in Portugal he was imprisoned again by his new king, this time accused of supporting Castile, though this would not prevent him from acting in favor of his native country with every means at his disposal (Prestage 1914).

Provoked by an anonymous Spanish political pamphlet written in the middle of the Restoration war, to which he referred as La voz de Castilla, Melo wrote the Ecco polytico (1645). For him, one of the most outrageous claims of the pro-Castilian text was that, had a more aggressively centralist policy been applied to Portugal during the years of the Iberian union, the rebellion would have been avoided, “and today they would all be Castilian and there would not be any separation of language and government, being all common as it is the law and the monarchy [Monarquía].” Francisco Manuel de Melo responded angrily to this Realpolitik new version of Nebrija's insights about language and political power: “He infers that we would all be Castilian, and it is more accurate to infer that we would be Portuguese, or we would not be anything at all…The separation of language does not seem to be up to the princes’ discretion…The spirit [ánimo] being free, will language not be so? How could it not be?” (1645: 57r).

Melo goes on to prove his argument by reminding the anonymous author that, despite political hegemony, Castile has not been able to impose its language on vassals and kingdoms either in Spain or abroad: “the subjects of Castile themselves have differences in language, without them being altered by any nation: Galicians, Asturians, Biscayans, Guipuzcoans and Alavese, all adhere to the antiquity of their native languages. The same happens in Navarre, where few commoners speak the Romance. Valencia and Catalonia still use the Lemosin language with varying degrees of corruption. Aragon always spoke the ancient Castilian and people from Mallorca barely understand it.” Naples and Sicily, in spite of being “keen on Spanish rule and manners” [aficionados a la policía española], have never abandoned their language, while in Flanders neither persuasive nor repressive policies have been able to modify the linguistic behavior of either “the nobles or the commoners.” Of all peninsular nations, concludes Melo, Portugal is the most dissimilar from Castile in customs: “justice, constitutions, manners, currency, weight and measure, everything is different” and even “what we borrowed of some customs and fashion…may be caused just by vicinity, and not necessarily by dominion [imperio]” (56v–57r).¹⁷

Presumably, Melo would have strongly disagreed with Nebrija, had he ever had the chance to read the prologue to his pioneering grammar. Proximity sometimes achieves what extended political power – imperio – does not; social interaction on a local level may contribute to spread a particular custom or linguistic practice more than global imperial policies. But the fruits of empire could be wisely appropriated by its enemies. Melo's Ecco polytico, like the pamphlet that motivated it, did not target an exclusively Spanish audience, but an international one: the English courtiers and diplomats in charge of the negotiations between the newly acclaimed João IV and Charles I of England (the first European monarch to recognize the Portuguese king's legitimacy), the pope, and the new French ambassador in Lisbon, who received a copy of the pamphlet from Melo himself (Prestage Reference Prestage1914: 210). The fact that Melo chose Castilian – as he did in much of his literary production – to defend unambiguously the prerogatives and the identity of the Portuguese nation should, I hope, no longer strike us.¹⁸ Melo is aware of the fact that a pamphlet written in Spanish would be able to reach a wider international audience, crucial to secure Portugal's allies in the European arena, or “the world's battlefield” [la campaña del mundo] (Ecco polytico: 100v). While Spanish hegemony had accustomed both friends and foes to learn the language of the empire, Castile's voice could be loudly echoed throughout the empire to make it tremble. What the notions of nation and empire must bring to the exploration of the political history of Spanish is not a narrative of uncontested triumph at home and abroad, but one of complexity, connectedness and struggle on both a local and a global scale.

Introduction

This volume takes a contextual approach to language in order to analyze linguistic thought in relation to political and social questions of authority, legitimacy and power (Del Valle's Chapter 1). However, what Jan Blommaert (Reference Blommaert2005: 130) has called the “layered simultaneity” of local and global spatial frames and of long- and short-term temporalities means that it is not obvious what the appropriate political and social context is for the interpretation of a given idea about language in a particular historical moment. As Miguel Martínez's chapter (this volume) demonstrates, dominant narratives of nation and empire need to be nuanced by an appreciation of complexity and contestation on a local as well as a global scale. Careful groundwork is necessary to uncover, rather than assume, the politics of a text in its own time and place, and even to know how that time and place are to be defined.

This chapter, like Martínez's, recontextualizes a historical text in Spanish linguistics and thus unsettles accepted storylines. The text addressed here is Del origen y principio de la lengua castellana ò romance que oi se usa en España [On the origin and beginnings of the Castilian language or Romance, which is used in Spain today], by Bernardo José de Aldrete, published in 1606 (1972).¹ Aldrete's work, which is recognized as the first published history of Spanish, argued at length that the language had been derived from Latin. Once praised as a proto-scientific linguist (Alonso Reference Alonso1938: 105), Aldrete has come under critical scrutiny in recent decades as an apologist for the Spanish imperial project in the Americas. To the modern eye, a claim to Latin linguistic origins seems clearly to be a glorification of Spanish and Spain, and a legitimation of Spanish conquests based on the Roman model (Guitarte Reference Guitarte, Quilis and Nierderehe1986; Mignolo Reference Mignolo1995).

Yet, surprisingly for this critical modern view, Aldrete's thesis of Latin origins was received by powerful contemporaries as an inglorious outrage against the Spanish nation, and it provoked decades of furor in Spain. As Paul Firbas (Chapter 10 in this volume) writes, quoting Edward Said, the study of origins and the construction of beginnings is always a political act. But just what kind of political act? To understand both the controversy and the full social significance of Aldrete's theory of Latin linguistic origins, I have followed a trail of forgeries and miracles, religious intolerance and ethnic extirpation. In this chapter, I argue that Aldrete's work takes on different meaning when we trace its complicated ties to the precarious position of the Moriscos in Spain. Theories of the Latin versus Babelian origins of the Spanish language were entangled with a growing ideology of racial difference that was pivotal in the final struggle between “Old Christian” Spaniards and “New Christians” of Islamic origin in a unified Catholic Spanish state.

Aldrete in polemical context

The opposition to Aldrete's thesis of Latin origins claimed that Castilian was the primordial language of Spain, created in the confusion at Babel and brought to Spain by Tubal, grandson of Noah (see Binotti Reference Binotti1995). The most powerful proponent of the theory of primordial Castilian was Gregorio López Madera (1562–1649), a jurist who published his linguistic ideas in sweeping essays in 1595 and again in 1601 when he was a prosecutor in the chancery court in Granada. Soon after, his star rose at the royal court, and he attained positions of substantial authority and prestige. Madera reiterated his linguistic theory in a third publication in 1625, rebutting Aldrete's arguments point by explicit point.

In his several works López Madera argued that “our Castilian is the true language of our ancestors” (1595, qtd. in Nieto Jiménez 1972: 145); moreover, “our language now” is the same as that of fifteen hundred years earlier (López Madera 1601: 68v). He asserted that Castilian had not been formed from the corruption of Latin, but rather had always been a distinct language (1625: 106). The first Spaniards “never lost their language” despite centuries of subjection to Roman conquest, Madera concluded (1625: 100).

Since López Madera held the classical view that change from an originary perfection could only be decay (Read Reference Read1977; Reference Read1978), he professed to be scandalized by Aldrete's assertion that the Castilian language derived from any form of corruption, “as the scholar who raised the doubt, unworthy son of his fatherland, so unworthily called it, for solely through his imagination he wanted to deny to it its own language, which is so much a part of the honor of a nation” (López Madera 1601: 70).

In 1625, Madera further attacked Aldrete (who long since had come to deeply regret publishing his thesis for the grief it had brought him):

The origins of the origins debate

To make sense of Madera's vehement attacks on Aldrete's theory of Latin origins, we must set out on our circuitous tour through Early Modern Spanish history. The story that led Aldrete to publish his troubling book begins in 1588 in Granada, where laborers demolishing the main mosque to construct a Catholic cathedral uncovered a lead box in the ruins. Among the relics in the box was a parchment written in Arabic and Castilian, with a Latin annotation. The parchment claimed to contain a prophecy from St. John the Evangelist that had been translated from Hebrew into Castilian and buried in the time of Nero by St. Cecilio, who added a commentary in Arabic and then had it hidden.

Beginning in 1595 on a hill above Granada that came to be known as the Sacromonte (Holy Mountain), treasure hunters found lead plaques inscribed in Latin. These plaques told of the martyrdom of St. Cecilio, his brother St. Tesifon and other Christian disciples, on this same hill in the first-century reign of Nero. Remains were soon unearthed nearby, as were a number of lead books (libros plúmbeos, or plomos) inscribed in idiosyncratic Arabic letters. The authors were identified in the writings as the Arab brothers Cecilio and Tesifon, who had been converted to Christianity by Jesus himself and had come to Spain as disciples of St. James (Harris Reference Harris1999: 947). These astonishing discoveries caused excitement in all of Granada and much of Spain. They allowed Granada to trace an unbroken Christian tradition from the time of the apostles (Harris 2000: 127–8), and they established that Christianity had come to Spain before it came to France and England (Sotomayor Reference Sotomayor and de Burgos1996: xxxii). A hearing was held in 1600 to determine the authenticity of the relics, which were found to be genuine, to the jubilation of Granada. Among the worthies who judged the authenticity was Gregorio López Madera, Aldrete's opponent (see Barrios Aguilera and García Arenal 2006 for further discussion of the Sacromonte treasures).

Origins of the parchment: the racialization of the Moriscos

From the beginning, some observers suspected that the parchment and plomos had been forged and planted by local Moriscos, descendants of Muslims converted to Christianity after the Reconquest. It is now generally held that the documents were written by the very same Morisco leaders who were later called upon to help translate them.²

Why would Moriscos fabricate these Christian texts and relics? The Sacromonte texts are likely to have been a desperate attempt to redeem Granada's Moriscos by rewriting their history. Counter-Reformation Spain was increasingly intolerant of them, viewing most as apostates. Old Christian Spaniards feared that Moriscos were plotting with the Turks for another Islamic invasion. Such anxieties brought calls for their extermination or expulsion. Ultimately those of Islamic origin were constituted as an alien people that had to be extirpated from what had come to be defined as a Christian and Spanish territory (Root Reference Root1988; Shell Reference Shell1991). This ideological construction was achieved through three overlapping phases, whose focus progressed from religion, to culture, to blood.

By 1526, forced conversion to Christianity had been imposed on all Muslims in Andalusia, Castile and the crown of Aragon, and in theory there were no Muslims left on Spanish soil (Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent 1997: 25). The struggle then moved to cultural terrain, as “Old Christians” concluded that the mass conversions of Muslims as “New Christians” had, unsurprisingly, failed. In 1526, the Emperor Charles V prohibited numerous Arab cultural practices viewed as heretical, including Arabic names and language use. Now not just those who failed to embrace the Christian religion were seen as Muslims, but also those who preserved the most minor ancestral custom and thus revealed their origin: “At first it was the Infidel who was rejected; now it would be simply the Other” (Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent 1997: 22).

Although there was an initial reprieve of the imperial order, strict cultural prohibitions were reinstated in Granada in 1567, when Arabic names, speaking, reading and writing all were outlawed (Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent 1997: 268–72; Lea Reference Lea1901: 228–9). Don Francisco Núñez Muley, an elderly leader of the Granada Moriscos, appealed the prohibitions, arguing that the forbidden practices were regional, not religious. Diversity of dress and other customs was accepted among Christian Europeans, and it was only Morisco customs that were singled out as unacceptable. The Arabic language was unobjectionable in principle, asserted Núñez Muley: “Language does not bear on Muslim doctrine, either for or against” (Garrad Reference Garrad1953: 221). In any case, although almost all Moriscos wished to learn Castilian, few teachers were available. It would be nearly impossible for the elderly to learn it in their remaining years, asserted the aged Núñez Muley (see Barletta's further discussion of the memorandum in Núñez Muley 2007 [1657]). Nevertheless, the prohibitions were instituted, and in response a Morisco rebellion soon arose in the mountains of Granada.

One aristocratic Spaniard who witnessed the revolt depicted a rebel leader, Hernando de Válor, “el Zaguer,” rousing the Morisco community with an impassioned speech on its oppression:

Religious, cultural and linguistic traces of Islamic origin were now nearly fully established as intolerable in Spain, but the construction of difference as damning did not stop there. It continued into the domain of genealogy in a racializing policy of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), in which a non-Christian ancestor was deemed to taint bloodlines irredeemably. By racialization, I mean an ideology that explicitly locates significant social difference in characteristics viewed as natural, essential and ineradicable because biologically given. Statutes of limpieza de sangre had been developing throughout Spain since the mid-fifteenth century. They excluded from public and religious offices any individual who could be shown to have an ancestor who had been Jewish, Islamic, or penanced by the Inquisition.³ This doctrine was originally aimed at Jewish conversos whose power in the royal court and clerical orders was coveted by Old Christians, but the same progression of the basis of exclusion from religion to genealogy also applied to Moriscos.

The debate over the expulsion of the Moriscos

By the opening of the seventeenth century, it seemed incontrovertible to Old Christians on any side of the Morisco question that non-Christian people could not be tolerated on Spanish soil in the long term. But was the correct solution to the Morisco problem continued evangelization, expulsion, confiscation of children from Morisco parents, castration, extermination? These alternatives were interminably mooted; policy decisions were made and unmade.

Pedro de Valencia, royal chronicler, Christian humanist and outspoken opponent of the Sacromonte parchment and plomos, was also one of the most vociferous opponents of expulsion and other final measures. Valencia's recommendation was to disperse Morisco communities throughout Spain and then convert them through evangelization and social integration (Gómez Canseco Reference Gómez Canseco1993: 236; Valencia Reference Valencia and Sanjuán1997: 11). His arguments were given short shrift.

The strongest voices argued that Moriscos were inassimilable. Biological accounts indicted the whole community, including children: “they have the infected root within their guts” (qtd. in Cardaillac Reference Cardaillac and Redondo1983: 14). As one exasperated missionary wrote, “Terrible are the mute and silent arguments that make the blood cry out within the veins. After we preach to them, these wretches respond, ‘My father – Moor; myself – Moor’” (qtd. in Domínguez Ortiz Reference Domínguez Ortiz1962: 44).

The controversy over the Morisco problem came to a head in the same years as the struggles over the authenticity of the plomos and the linguistic conflict between Aldrete and López Madera. After years of debate, the first royal order for the expulsion of the Moriscos finally came in 1609, and expulsions of some 275,000 Moriscos were carried out through 1614 (Cardaillac and Dedieu 1990: 26).

The Sacromonte forgeries as proposed solution

The troubled prelude to expulsion was the context in which the Granada parchment and plomos were planted. In what may have been a last-ditch attempt to redeem the Morisco community, the texts traced the city's roots to Arab Christian apostles and martyrs, who thus became the oldest Christians in Spain. Moreover, the books gave Arabic people a leading role in Christian redemption. In a particularly pointed passage, Peter asks the Virgin Mary,

For Moriscos, what was important about the plomos was the discovery that Cecilio, the patron saint of Granada, was an Arab. Old Christians, in contrast, overlooked the news that their first bishop had been of Arab origins as well as the books’ praise of the stellar character of Arabs. For them, the parchment and the plomos allowed the portrayal of the city's original, true character as Christian (Harris 2000: 127–8). The Sacromonte discoveries became part of a larger program to Christianize Islamic Granada and to push Moriscos entirely outside the narrative of Granadine tradition (Harris 2000: 126; see also Harris 2007).

The role of language in the Sacromonte polemics

Unfortunately, the parchment and the books themselves posed inconveniences for these Old Christian civic and national-religious projects. The basic challenges were linguistic: how could Castilian appear in texts from the first century, if as a corruption of Latin it did not exist until well after the arrival of the Visigoths in the fifth century? If the linguistic facts could not be reconciled, then the parchment and the plomos were false, a disastrous loss for Granada and Spain. This was the motivation for the debate over the origins of Castilian.

Among those who were skeptical about the plomos was Pedro de Valencia, who concluded dryly,

López Madera took Valencia's first route, insisting that Castilian was already spoken in the time of the apostles. In defense of the Sacromonte discoveries, he elaborated the theory of Primordial Castilian: “what we find in the language of the prophecy is the most certain, the truest and at the same time one of the most honorable things that we could ask for our nation, the antiquity of its language” (López Madera 1601: 75r), which “we can say is the same as that of one thousand, one thousand and five hundred, years ago” (70v).

In contrast, Aldrete's approach was the second one suggested by his fellow humanist Pedro de Valencia. Although Aldrete defended the authenticity of the Sacromonte parchment and books, he insisted that the Castilian in which the parchment was written was not spoken at the time when St. Cecilio wrote it. Rather, it was a miracle that the parchment was written in modern Castilian, a language not yet born: “The way that before there was a Castilian language it could be written in the Parchment was through the miraculous gift of tongues” (Aldrete Reference Aldrete1614: 326). St. Cecilio had the gifts both of prophecy and of tongues and so was able to divine the language that would be spoken fifteen hundred years later, when the parchment would be needed and therefore revealed:

In some ways, language was incidental to the ethno-religious, civic and national history at the heart of this event, just an annoying obstacle to documentary proof. However, the language debate became important in its own right. Moreover, the language debate epitomized the questions and visions of society that were at stake in the Christian–Morisco controversy: What is the essential expression of the nature of a nation? What is the relationship of dominator and dominated? Is coexistence possible? The most fundamental question was: What is the truth about human difference? All of these questions are addressed throughout Aldrete's and López Madera's work, just as they are throughout the many tracts on the Morisco question. Echoes of answers given in the Morisco debate can be identified in Aldrete's own text. With the frame of the Christian–Morisco struggle established, and with these questions in mind, we can now return to the analysis of the linguistic controversy itself.

Ideologies of language in López Madera and Aldrete

Aldrete and López Madera shared an absolute conviction in the rightness of Christianity, and this Christian belief was expressed in the divine ordination of language. However, they each had very different models of the workings of providence in language. López Madera traced Castilian directly to God as its creator at Babel. Aldrete gave a less direct role to God's intervention in human cultural and linguistic affairs. Although he believed that it was God's design that Latin spread around the world to facilitate the preaching of Christianity (1614: 3–5), he thought that the Roman Empire and Latin language had to develop through human efforts in order for that design to be fulfilled. Aldrete was impressed not by the origin of language nor by the glorious high culture carried in a language like Latin, but rather by the language's destiny in God's purpose (Nieto Jiménez 1972: 47).

In what follows, I focus on several central themes around which Aldrete's and López Madera's views of language were directly opposed.

Summary: contrasting linguistic ideologies

These themes add up to two very distinct visions of cultural and linguistic difference in society. The key concepts in Aldrete's vision of humanity, language and culture are “mutability and perfectibility,” while in Madera's vision “origins and essences” are central.

Absolutism and the new technologies of language

The arrival in Spain of a new king and a new dynasty in 1700 was the point of departure for the irreversible deployment of a new set of “technologies of power” unknown under the previous rule of the Habsburgs. The transformations in the institutional structure of the state, the new sets of laws, the disciplinary grid that the Bourbons progressively spread over the territory and its subjects followed the theoretical principles of French absolutism, first developed by Bossuet (1627–1704) and personally transmitted to the future Philip V by his instructor, Fenelon (1651–1715). These principles implied the blurring of the traditional boundaries of politics and made possible the extension of royal power into the private sphere of their subjects or, rather, its crucial role in the very definition of that “privacy.” Practices previously left outside the reach of the state would now constitute a new site for its projection. As Foucault and his many followers have shown us, in the eighteenth-century state power became progressively invisible, confused with the individual body itself, now functioning as its subject and object at once in an undivided space of self-discipline previously associated only with religious (bad) conscience (Foucault Reference Foucault1990: 291). If the new configuration of power implied, in that sense, the blurring of subject and object, private and public, body and state, it is of course no surprise that language should become a privileged disciplinary instrument. Is it not precisely language that is the vanishing point of the radical “privacy” of the body into public space, the ultimate questioning of its limits? There was no more convenient entrance into the realm of the body for purposes of political “subjection” for the new mechanisms of power.

In order to understand the new ways in which language in particular and culture in general became political vehicles in this context we should consider what is perhaps the most influential formulation of absolutism, that of Bossuet, whose teachings were at the very core of the Bourbons’ conception of their own royal power. According to him, the authority of the king was always already sacred and always already there (“the royal throne is not the throne of man, but the throne of god himself”) (Bossuet Reference Bossuet1990: 58). It had no origin. His schema erased any possibility of a contractual moment but also implied that the political dimension of the subject had no origin either. The individual's subjection was inscribed in his body and his soul from the beginning as part of his (Catholic nature) in a way. There was no Hobbesian wolf/man here, but rather an eternal son of his father (“all the world agrees that obedience, which is due to public power, is only found (in the Decalogue) in the precept which obliges one to honor his parents”) (Bossuet Reference Bossuet1990: 62). Hobbes's diachronic and historical logic was replaced in Bossuet by the synchronic generalization of a patriarchal space in which the subject was always a son submitted to the tutelage of the king. There was no possible age of emancipation but rather an eternal minority and endless state of tutelage under the monarch. Education had no end. Father, monarch and God were placed in analogous positions. Familiar, and also political, obedience were inscribed in the (religious) body.¹ Political obedience was thus mandated by religious conscience (Bossuet Reference Bossuet1990: 59–61).

Accordingly, the domain of royal power was redefined beyond the traditional sphere of the political, erasing any chronological distinction between religious and political interpellation. This line of thought allowed for the sphere of language to be considered a possible object of control or even legislation by the state along with other issues – such as modes of hygiene or any kind of “practices from everyday life” – that, until then, had been thought to be beyond its reach. Those new spheres of discipline could also be read as an attempt to “secularize” and politicize what had previously been under the safe grip of the church under the strategy of “bad conscience.” Feelings such as shame about certain expressions or productions of the body were now the object of political interpellation following the religious structure of “bad conscience.” Discipline was to be internalized by the subject, direct repression replaced by self-control. Laporte's analysis regarding the new place of the state in the circulation of waste gives us an idea about its new role in the control of the “private sphere”: “The state…is the grand collector, the tax guzzler, the cloaca maxima that reigns over all that shit, channeling and purifying it, delegating a special corporation to collect it” (Laporte Reference Laporte2000: 46). An analogy could easily be traced with the new symbolic circulation of language legitimacy in eighteenth-century Spain, where the Academy would fulfill that central role of “channeling and purification.” The self-consciousness of the speaker about his own personal use of language was now to be politically mediated. That will be precisely one of the main hypotheses of these pages: the institutionalization of language in eighteenth-century Spain should be understood as the secularization of structures of “discipline” that, until then, had been under the monopoly of the church. In this regard, the process of institutionalization and, in particular, the creation of the Royal Spanish Academy (henceforth RAE from Real Academia Española) should be conceived in dialogue with the deployment and application of “regalism,” the political philosophy that argued for the priority of the monarch over the church in general and the pope in particular in a variety of attributions (see Sánchez Agesta Reference Sánchez Agesta1979: 175–83), and that constituted the axis of that process of “appropriation” of technologies of the eternal by the temporal.

The most important document of Spanish regalism in eighteenth-century Spain, the Pedimento de los 55 párrafos, was written in 1713 – the year the RAE was founded – by Melchor de Macanaz (1670–1760), a very close friend of the Academy's founder, Juan Manuel Fernández Pacheco, Marquis of Villena (1650–1725). Through this personal link, the following pages will trace the close relationship between the “cultural” project that led to the creation of the RAE and “regalism.”

A regalist in the court

Many of Juan Manuel Fernández Pacheco's hagiographies have been written in the context of the RAE's history and are heavily indebted to the eulogies read on the occasion of his funeral in 1725.² Quite often, they portray a monumental figure, both a great soldier and a humanist, always comfortable in the battlefield or in his legendary library, but also always feeling suspicious, slightly out of context in the royal court, surrounded by treacherous politicians whom he despised. He is pictured as keeping his distance, quiet and silent, not getting involved in ubiquitous political intrigues. Only a single anecdote keeps reappearing in those accounts that, for a moment, suspends that image of distant and prudent suspicion.³ Already invested with the dignity of mayordomo mayor (chief of staff) by the king, the Marquis is denied his right to enter the royal chambers by the future Cardinal Alberoni. The former, in rage, raises his cane (he could barely walk after his harsh imprisonment in Italy) and violently beats the priest. The extraordinary scene – one that would be remembered in the court's lobbies for years – does not only illustrate the resentment of the head of one of the most illustrious noble families in the country against a professional politician just elevated to the dignity of count for his services. Once we begin tracing the political position of both figures, the anecdote turns into a perfect metonym of the political environment in the court and the irreconcilable differences within. Alberoni would become the most influential politician in the nation after the arrival of the new queen, Isabel de Farnesio, in 1714, and also the person responsible for the radical defeat of the reformers favored by the king until the rapid change that took effect just days after the royal marriage. The Marquis of Villena, along with the Princess of Ursinos,⁴ was one of the symbolic pillars of that reform through the very tight connection between the prestige of his name and the most active and radical of the reformers, Melchor de Macanaz.

Despite the systematic attempt of his many biographers within the RAE to de-politicize the figure of the Marquis, a superficial revision of his role in the courts of Charles II and Philip V is enough to clearly place him within a very specific political project, “regalism.” The political and cultural initiatives of the Marquis were tightly related: on the one hand, his role in support of a regalist turn in Spanish politics; on the other, his creation of the RAE. The latter cannot be easily separated from the former and should instead be conceived as necessarily intertwined with it. As we will see, the process of institutionalization of language through the RAE in 1713 establishes a complex dialogue with the radical reform attempted on two other institutions that very same year under the regalist trend: the Council of Castile and the Spanish Inquisition. The Council's resistance to the creation of the RAE has been presented as a surprising gesture of disobedience to the king and as a result of bureaucratic laziness (Zamora 1999: 29), of a superficial resentment against everything new, or, quite simply, of the personal resistance from a Galician councilor, with a particularly strong local accent, afraid of his possible marginalization (Cotarelo 1914: 36). Nevertheless, an analysis of the radical changes that the Council was undergoing at exactly the same time that the petition regarding the RAE was being considered allows us to unveil a very different and complex landscape. What seemed to be an innocuous cultural project was directly associated with the people responsible for reforming the very Council that, only a few years before, as we will see, had condemned them in the strongest possible terms. What the Council saw in the structure and constitution of the RAE was a model of institutionalization that had a lot in common with the one being implemented in its own mechanisms. The RAE was viewed as an infamous mirror-image of the ideal Council that reformers had in mind, in short, a secularized institution withdrawn from its old complicity with the church and whose traditional independence was being submitted to a rigorous process of centralization and direct control by royal authority.

The Marquis and the lawyer

It could be said that everything started around Charles II's deathbed in 1700. The prospect of a chaotic succession due to the absence of a direct heir and the competing strong invested interests of all European empires consumed the last of the Habsburgs. Unable to make a decision, he desperately asked for advice from the Pope, Innocent XII, but also from his most trusted courtiers, specifically three of the most influential names in Spanish nobility, the Count of Montellano, the Duke of Montaldo and the Marquis of Villena (Martín Gaite Reference Martín Gaite1988: 30). All of them declared themselves in favor of the Bourbon candidate and, along with him, of an implicit reform of the nation after the innovative model of French absolutism. The alternative, the house of Habsburg, was seen as the useless continuity of a model that had taken Spain to its political decadence and financial ruin.

Just a few months before, the Marquis had made an acquaintance of great relevance for his own future and his family's. Every Saturday the Count of Montellano organized an informal tertulia at his home, where issues of politics and law were discussed by Madrid's brightest minds. The Marquis of Villena was a frequent participant, as was a young lawyer in his twenties, educated in Salamanca; both showed a proclivity for the most progressive views and displayed extraordinary knowledge of traditional Spanish law. The lawyer's name was Melchor de Macanaz, possibly the most important of those responsible for the implementation of regalist reforms after the arrival of Philip V. What is perhaps even more important for the purpose of this chapter, he would be appointed Attorney General of the Council of Castile precisely in 1713, the year when the RAE was founded.

From the very beginning, the mentality of the Marquis – combining a strong demand for the renewal of the country's stagnant institutions, helped by his Francophile views, with the traditionalism invested in his name and title – found a natural companion in a young lawyer whose historical and legal knowledge served as an extraordinarily rigorous source of support for the introduction of new ideas coming from France. The Marquis would hire Macanaz as the main tutor responsible for the education of his sons, especially his oldest, Mercurio, who would later succeed his father as the RAE's director. His attachment and trust in the young lawyer would be confirmed when, after the arrival of the new king in 1700, the Marquis was invested Viceroy of Sicily. Forced to leave his estate in Madrid, he chose none other than Macanaz as his “general agent” in the court (Martín Gaite Reference Martín Gaite1988: 34). In the years when the Marquis was absent from Spain, Macanaz quickly became one of the main architects of the reforms undertaken by the new king. During the war, Macanaz served as Mercurio's personal secretary, but once the balance of the war favored the Bourbon, Macanaz gained an important political post in Valencia that positioned him at the very front of the two main political fights of the new dynasty: those against the church and those against the regional privileges known as fueros.

In that period Macanaz, because of his expertise in Spanish traditional law, was in continuous contact with Michel Amelot, the new French ambassador interested in adapting to the Spanish context the regalist measures that had been successfully implemented in France. Their communications were not limited to the role of the church and its complex relationship with the king's secular power; they were also extremely useful in building the intellectual foundation for a substantial critique of the regional fueros and, more specifically, of the role of the Council of Aragon, which would soon be abolished by the king. In one of the long reports addressed to Amelot, an exhaustive criticism of the Council of Aragon, we can find a very enlightening reference to the Marquis of Villena:

Among the legal authorities and erudite references in the text, Macanaz was relying on one of the biggest names in Spanish nobility, but also on the Marquis's direct experience as a soldier. It would be inconceivable, even with his proximity to the Marquis and his family, that Macanaz could be using his name without the absolute certainty that the Marquis would implicitly or explicitly agree with the use of his symbolic authority.

Finally, on June 29, 1707, the fueros of Aragon and Valencia were abolished. A few months after that, in a Royal Decree dated October 5, Macanaz was appointed judge in Valencia (Juez de Confiscaciones). From that position, he would have the opportunity not only to feed the coffers of the king by expropriating the properties of his former war enemies but also to try, by any means, to reduce the church's access to sources of money that he wished to reserve to the exclusive right of the king. Predictably, he antagonized not only the church and the Inquisition but also the Council of Castile, whose conservative nature would view Macanaz's activities with suspicion. In 1708 the Council strongly condemned him and one year later he was presented with the church's harshest punishment, excommunication. It was in those years that a distant but still influential certain nobleman secluded in an Italian jail came back into Macanaz's life. To console him after his excommunication, one of Villena's sons, the Marquis of Moya, compares the politician's situation to his father's: “I want to give you no other consolation than my father's example, since after serving the king he has been left to suffer in a prison.…remember his tolerance and try to have no less” (qtd. in Martín Gaite Reference Martín Gaite1988: 131).

Moya was comparing not only Macanaz and Villena but also, implicitly, their enemies. The roles of the church and the Council of Castile in the case of the former were indirectly presented as analogous to that of the enemies of the crown, the supporters of the Habsburg candidate to the throne who were responsible for the Marquis's incarceration. But the parallel between Macanaz and Villena became even more real in better circumstances just two years later: thanks to the support of the regalists in the court, particularly Robinet, his Majesty's confessor, Macanaz regained the king's favor. And not only that, the reformist operation headed by the Princess of Ursinos had him as one of its essential tools. After writing some of the theoretical texts that would constitute the axis of political reform, regarding both the abolition of the fueros and the relationship between the church and the king, Macanaz was chosen as the main figure responsible for the radical transformation planned for the Council of Castile and, potentially, the Inquisition itself.

When Macanaz finally arrived in Madrid, getting closer to his stellar appointment as Attorney General of the Council, he was coming from Paris. Quite possibly, he had traveled to the French capital to receive the Marquis of Villena, finally released from jail thanks to a prisoner exchange. It is also quite possible that they traveled together to Madrid.

Game of mirrors: the Council of Castile and the Royal Spanish Academy

Macanaz's and Villena's double return marked the simultaneous point of departure for two parallel and inextricable developments: the creation of the RAE and the attempt to radically redefine the role and constitution of the most important political institution in Spain after the king himself, the Council of Castile.

Our analysis of those two parallel developments will focus first on the historical and institutional connections between them. A comparative analysis of the chronology of both the Council's reform, implemented by Macanaz between 1713 and 1714, and the approval of Villena's RAE project by that very same Council reveals significant connections. As we will see, it is most unlikely that the councilors did not see a strong symbolic relation between the two projects, if only for the very public strong link between the two men responsible for them, Macanaz and Villena.

Right after his arrival in Madrid, Villena started organizing informal meetings with his friends at his palace. Many of the same people that we could find in the Saturday tertulias attended by the Marquis before his departure showed up at the new meetings. Macanaz was, of course, one of them (Martín Gaite Reference Martín Gaite1988: 170). As has been said again and again in the many accounts of the RAE's origins, it was there that the new institution was conceived. But behind the peaceful meetings there was no shortage of political intrigue. The regalist team, constituted by the Princess of Ursinos, Jean Orry, the king's confessor Robinet, and the increasingly important Macanaz were trying to convince Villena to turn his symbolic endorsement for the regalist cause into a more substantial support. Different possibilities to involve the Marquis in the front line of politics were considered. Nevertheless Villena, possibly because of his poor health after so many years of imprisonment, rejected all of them and was instead appointed Mayordomo Mayor, a title with extraordinary symbolic importance but no real content (Alabrús 2005–06: 186). His support for the regalist cause would be of a totally different nature. His project to institutionalize language through the RAE would serve the cause, not at the level of direct and explicit political action, but rather as a means of extending political subjection to processes of interpellation and identity construction such as language itself.

But before that, it is necessary to go back to politics. At the same time as the RAE was being incubated in the Marquis's tertulias, Macanaz was initiating his assault on the Council of Castile. As a response to a petition from the king inquiring about the limits of the power of the Council, Macanaz wrote a Legal Rebuttal [Refutación Jurídica] in which, in very clear terms, he denied all possible independence to the Council, whose power was understood to come exclusively from the king himself. The “council was nothing without the king” (Macanaz, qtd. in Martín Gaite Reference Martín Gaite1988: 170).

As might be expected, the Refutación infuriated the Council as much as it delighted the king, who appointed Macanaz Attorney General of the Council in the same decree that radically transformed its constitution and role, turning it into a mere extension of his own authority. It was an attempt to substitute the ministerial system of the French court for the polysynodal system favored by the Habsburgs (Dedieu Reference Dedieu2000: 116–22; López-Cordón Reference López-Cordón2000). That decree was signed on November 10, 1713, less than one month after the Council received an apparently unrelated minor decree asking for its advice about a cultural project conceived by his majesty's Mayordomo mayor, the possible creation of a royal academy that would protect the elegance and purity of Spanish. By then the Council was already aware of Macanaz's Refutación and the imminent and radical transformation of the Council. In those circumstances, any petition coming from the person responsible for opening the court's lobbies to Macanaz obviously had to be treated with suspicion, if not outright resistance.⁵ In a polite answer to the king, the Council expressed a certain reticence and denied its direct support for the Marquis's initiative. It required some substantial proof of the kind of work the Academy intended to pursue (Gil Ayuso Reference Gil Ayuso1952: 595–5).

Effectively ignoring the Council's resolution, the Marquis presented for its consideration a new memorial signed on November 14, just four days after the appointment of Macanaz following the decree that ordered the radical transformation of the Council. The memorial referred to the creation of a Dictionary, a Grammar and a Poetics, and described in very general terms the planned institutional structure of the Academy.

Two different reports coming from the Council were signed on December 2 and January 16. Macanaz wrote the first one. He gave straightforward and clear support to the creation of the Academy and denied the need to wait for any substantial work prior to the approval of the new institution. The second one came from the Council itself, which once again found a way to delay its unambiguous support for the initiative, asking for a description of the emblem and seals to be used by the academy (Gil Ayuso Reference Gil Ayuso1952: 596–7).

When, after the obvious pressure imposed by the king's and Macanaz's support, the Council had no choice but to approve the initiative, it still found a way to express its discomfort. In May, Villena complained to the king that the Council had given its approval through an “ordinary approval” and not a “royal bond” as requested by the Academy. A royal order ten days later demanded that the Marquis's petition be granted.

But this story of distrust, reticence and veiled hampering is just a small symptom of the real issues affecting the Council during those months. Macanaz was at the center of all of them. In the relatively short period of time, less than a year, that it took for the RAE project to be considered and finally supported by the Council, a number of other projects were also being considered. Right after the decree describing the changes in the institution, Macanaz introduced proposals for the limitation of the rights of the church regarding its access to certain economic benefits, for a radical transformation of the Spanish university and finally, with the famous Pedimento de los 55 párrafos (Fifty-Five-Paragraph Request), for the implicit limitation of the reach of the Inquisition. All these in addition to the intention, stated in another memorial to the king in January of the same year, to abolish all the Catalan fueros as a punishment for the military resistance to the king (Alabrús Reference Alabrús2005–06: 184). In one way or the other, it could be said that all these issues resonated in the minds of the councilors when considering the, in comparison, very minor issue of the RAE's foundation.

We could begin, for example, with the institutional change of the Council. When, along with Macanaz's appointment, the council received the Decreto de nueva Planta para los consejos de Castilla y de hacienda y sala de Alcaldes, con la supresión de la cámara de Castilla (De Dios 1986: 128–32), there was an intriguing coincidence with the proposal for the creation of the RAE received less than a month before: the number of ministers for the new council and that of academicians in the new cultural institution was to be the same, 24. Simultaneously, it was impossible that the councilors did not perceive an almost ironic similarity between some of the words in the Marquis's Memorial and the implications of the Royal Decree regarding the Council's transformation: Villena's purpose was not only to ask for the king's support but also to establish a very particular relationship between the academicians and the King. He asked for every member of the Academy to be invested with the honorific of “Royal Servant” (Real Academia Española 1726–39: 10).

It could be said that the language used by the Marquis in his memorial is tainted by a purely formal quality and a need to flatter the king, but still, it looks like a detailed script for the new role that was being imposed on the councilors by the Royal Decree of May: no longer an independent institution but mere servants of the king. The rhetoric used by Villena meticulously coincided with the regalist nightmare confronted by the Council.

The institutionalization of the Spanish language being proposed through the RAE's creation had also a lot to do with the kind of reform Macanaz was proposing for the university. This took the form of a harmless curricular change. Fed up with the useless education that he himself had received, Macanaz proposed to substitute the study of current and traditional Spanish Law for an old curriculum entirely centered in Roman law: in other words, to elevate the Spanish language to the vehicle of instruction in law schools along with Latin (Coronas González Reference Coronas González1992: 113–14). But this reform had a much more important social impact. It was also conceived to reduce the immense power of the Colegios mayores,⁶ the source not only of most members of the Council of Castile but also of most holders of positions of political responsibility. Education and not privilege should now be the door to the political sphere. Macanaz, as a manteísta (not a member of any of the Colegios mayores), was always perceived as an enemy by the Council. But this reform, which threatened to give new power to other manteístas, could only be perceived with terror by political elites. The institutionalization of the Castilian language was seen as connected with the potential redistribution of power in which “regalism” was the context that allowed complicity between the king and the bourgeoisie against the old nobility and its privileges.

Another pressing issue in Macanaz's agenda for the Council was the proposed abolition of the Catalan fueros, which would take place only later, in 1716. The issue of language would be explicitly mentioned for the first time in a decree published in January 1716. Along with the prescription of renovations in the structure of local and regional administrations to give the king more influence over local authorities, it banned the use of Catalan in a variety of juridical contexts (Moreno Fernández Reference Moreno Fernández2005: 169). It is hard not to see a connection between the process of legitimization, codification and royal tutelage of the Academy – founded three years before the 1716 decree – and the political-turned-linguistic marginalization of regional interests that had to submit to the central authority of the king.

The issue of the RAE was also not unrelated to the most important confrontation faced by Macanaz, that with the Inquisition itself. In his Pedimento, finished on December 19, a few days after he signed his favorable report on the RAE, Macanaz conceived the most explicit regalist attack of the eighteenth century against the position of the church, its relationship with the king and, implicitly, the role of the Inquisition. Not since Chumacero and Pimentel's Memorial⁷ in 1633 had such a vitriolic attack been written in Spain against the temporal privileges of the church. Only Omar Talon's Traite de l'autorite de Roi…. – published in Amsterdam in 1700, condemned by the Inquisition at the same time as Macanaz's text and quite probably a direct inspiration for the latter – would be comparable. Briefly put, Macanaz's goal in the Pedimentos was none other than the appropriation of many of the attributions of the church and the Inquisition by the royal authority.

Again, a small coincidence allows us to establish a connection between Macanaz's regalist attack on the Inquisition and the RAE. Luis Curiel, the former Attorney General displaced by Macanaz, and possibly one of his worst enemies in the Council, sent the latter a virulent response to the Pedimento with a strong defense of the Inquisition. It was dated March 1, 1714:

Only eight days afterwards, the council asked Villena to provide a description of the “Empresa y sello” that would be used by the RAE. His answer is well known:

Some members of the RAE were also ministers in the Council and quite probably had read Curiel's answer. It is not improbable that Villena himself had known about it through Macanaz; but, in any case, the mere coincidence of a common metaphor of purification indexes the image that the Academy had of itself, that of a tribunal. The use of legal analogies was widespread in the first texts produced by the RAE:

The academicians were repeatedly identified as “Attorneys and judges” – as, indeed, many of them were – working either for the Inquisition itself (Juan Ferreras and José Casani) or for the Council of Castile.

It is hard not to see the mind of inquisitors behind language such as this:

The symbolic transfer between the Inquisition and the Academy, the circulation of people between the two institutions and between them and the Council of Castile, should be read in connection with the diffusion of the limits between the sacred and the profane that theories of regalism and absolutism had made possible. Authors such as Bossuet – as well as Chumacero and Pimentel, Omar Talon and others – opened, from both the French and the Spanish traditions, the way for new models of subjection in which the mechanisms reserved to the church were now at the disposal of secular powers. Those authors were ubiquitous in the libraries of Villena and Macanaz and directly or indirectly influential in the implementation of the regalist turn conceived by the Princess of Ursinos's circle.

The RAE – or, in other words, the institutionalization of language and culture – constituted the perfect space in which sacred and profane technologies of power came together in search for new modalities of political interpellation at the level of the body and personal identity, the “microphysics of power” popularized by Foucault.

In this sense, it would be wrong to think of the RAE as simply a regalist nest. An analysis of its members finds inquisitors, ministers of the Council and a minority of names related to the university and the cultural sphere. Its members were not only regalists but included also, for example, Luis Curiel, Macanaz's mortal enemy. The inclusive list of academicians – and the fact that most of them were politicians – illustrates the necessary permeability of those new technologies of power, which now included culture and language at the service of political subjection. The change was not a radical break but precisely a process of confusion and appropriation in which “mechanisms” previously ascribed before exclusively to the orbit of the church or the monarchy came together. If the regalist reform clearly failed in the short term in 1715, nevertheless it was an inevitable process in the long term. It was precisely the RAE's ability to congregate secular and religious names behind the “neutrality” of its cultural purpose that allowed it not only to survive the political uncertainties of the period but also to establish a cooperation and dialogue between very different minds that, if potential enemies in the political sphere, could work together under the guise of culture for the constitution of a new relationship between subject and politics through the institutionalization of language. The RAE was, in a way, a mechanism in the hands of, mostly, professional politicians to extend the reach of the political. Its ability to avoid the radical confrontation of Macanaz and other “enlightened” politicians and intellectuals, implementing instead an eclectic and apolitical environment, allowed the institution to survive and flourish. An implied regalist agenda was more effective and successful when framed in a cultural, apparently de-politicized, context. In the Academy, politicians who could be enemies in the Council or the court were reunited in a conciliatory environment under a common “cultural” goal. But what exactly was that common goal beyond the specific interests of different political factions?

Dagmar Fries, in her essential study about the RAE, is right to be skeptical about reasons traditionally adduced for the actions of the Academy in its first years. There are no traces in the institution's programmatic texts of fears surrounding the dangerous presence of too many French imports in the language (see also Lázaro Carreter 1985). There is no indication either of a protection against a culteranist trend in the use of Spanish in the period. Fries takes the programmatic texts of the Academy literally, especially the introduction to the Diccionario de autoridades, in order to identify its real goals: to increase the glory and the honor of the nation and elevate the international prestige of the Spanish language. For that purpose, a process of stabilization through the creation of a dictionary and a grammar was seen as necessary (Fries Reference Fries1989: 47).

But in its very first meeting the Academy produces a text that can help us extend Fries's analysis. She herself quotes it:

The Academy implicitly establishes another goal in these words: turning the vulgo into gente discreta, in other words, common people into responsible citizens who would be able to contribute to the “reputation and luster” of the nation.

The officialization of orthography

During the 1840s, teachers associated with Madrid's Academia Literaria y Científica de Instrucción Primaria (Literary and Scientific Academy of Elementary Education, henceforth ALCIP) – a non-governmental organization – engaged in a process of orthographic reform that, they claimed, would facilitate literacy acquisition in elementary schools. By organizing public debates and circulating newspaper articles – mainly through El Educador, a periodical publication created precisely with the purpose of spreading the ALCIP's ideas and activities – the association discussed and publicized the advantages of simplifying the Spanish alphabet. Although the teachers argued first over the specific orthographic features that would better represent the Spanish language, they also debated the most appropriate ways of implementing the reformed spelling system. While some defended a gradual simplification, others preferred a radical and quick reform; while one group of teachers suggested collaborating with the government and the RAE, others defended the legitimacy of the ALCIP to control the implementation process.

The heterogeneity and overwhelming number of proposals given voice in El Educador resulted in an intense debate which, in turn, aroused the editors’ fear that the lack of consensus would blur the common interest in spelling reform and strengthen their opponents, “etymologists, bitter enemies of all these reforms” (El Educador 1842: 3). Thus, in July 1842 they published an article intended to end the discussion by alerting the teachers to the harm it could cause and by selecting and promoting a single reformed system. However, they were careful to counter the perception of authoritarianism by insisting that El Educador had been open to all proposals: “Supporters of [orthographic] reforms cannot complain that the editors of El Educador have not shown frankness and understanding by including all the opinions they have been sent on this matter in order to give a platform to the reasons on which the opinions of every person are based” (3–4).

The article concluded by supporting a simplified alphabet drawn from a syllabary composed by the ALCIP in 1822 which reflected “the true pronunciation…as the clearest way to achieve a perfect, easy, and eternal orthography” (4). This new spelling system, grounded in the bi-univocal correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, consisted of 24 letters and introduced the following reforms: first, the simplification of pairs of letters representing the same sound, namely <c/q>, <c/z>, <g/j> and <i/y>, writing ceja, zita, jiro and lei instead of queja (complaint), cita (appointment), giro (turn) and ley (law); second, the substitution of simple letters <r> and <y> for the digraphs <rr> and <ll>, and of letter <n> for <m> before <b> and <p> ; third, the elimination of silent letters <h> and <u> in the combinations <qu> and <gu>, writing anbre and gera rather than hambre (hunger) and guerra (war); fourth, the replacement of <x> for the letter <s> and the combination <cs>, in pre-consonantal and intervocalic positions, respectively; finally, the modification of the names of some letters so that the designation of the sounds would be homogenized (for instance, letters <m> and <r> would be renamed me and re (pronounced /ɾe/) instead of the traditional eme and erre).

This system was eventually selected by the teachers’ association for implementation in Spain's elementary schools. Soon after its publication in El Educador, the ALCIP printed it as an independent pamphlet intended to publicize both the system itself and its advantages for education.¹ A significant part of that pamphlet was devoted to a list of strategies to promote the reformed spelling system, among which the following are particularly salient: members of the ALCIP would write all official correspondence and their announcements in all newspapers using the new alphabet; they would also teach it in their schools; instructors would be urged to compose textbooks using the simplified orthography; and, finally, the ALCIP would inform both the Comisión de Instrucción Primaria and the RAE of the orthographic simplification in order to seek their endorsement.

Following these recommendations, on April 24, 1843 the RAE was sent six copies of the pamphlet together with a letter requesting its collaboration. The minutes from the RAE's meeting held three days later briefly recorded that the corporation had received the documents from the ALCIP and decided to have the secretary convey to the teachers the institution's decision to not support the new orthography, claiming that “such an innovation” would bring “serious inconveniences and no advantages.”

The RAE's negative reaction to the ALCIP's project went, indeed, well beyond disapproval of the proposed orthography and even involved a request for the queen to intervene and stop the implementation of the simplified alphabet in elementary schools. This petition was not made directly by the RAE but by the Consejo de Instrucción Pública [Council for Public Instruction], an advisory body recently created to oversee the public education system. Nevertheless, the bonds between the two organizations were numerous and important: Antonio Gil de Zárate (1796–1861) – whose views on education as a form of power opened this chapter – was a prominent member of the RAE as well as General Director of Public Instruction, and at least five other academicians held positions of responsibility in the Council at the time of its creation in 1843.²

Bearing in mind the RAE's opposition to the teachers’ proposal and considering the institution's privileged relation to and multiple connections with the government, it can be concluded that a number of academicians taking part in the public administration of instruction asked Queen Isabella II to ban the system devised by the teachers’ association from schools and to officialize the RAE's orthographic norms. The queen agreed and on April 25 and December 1, 1844 signed two Royal Decrees that respectively mandated the exclusive use of the institution's orthography and spelling textbook (Prontuario de ortografía de la lengua castellana [Handbook of orthography of the Castilian language], 1844) in Spain's elementary instruction.

Public debate over the officialization of orthography

These events have been usually described in the historiography of Spanish through a narrative that explains the officialization, first, as a necessary response to a radical proposal that could have had negative effects, second, as a legitimate reaction against the teachers’ association's meddling in the ongoing standardization process planned by the RAE, and, finally, as the closing point of the old controversy over spelling (Esteve Serrano Reference Esteve Serrano1982; Real Academia Española 1999; Vilar Reference Vilar1999). However, the material gathered for this project reveals that the queen's signing of the legal document that established the officialization stirred, rather than ended, the public debate. In the discussion that follows, I draw on the language-ideological debate (Blommaert Reference Blommaert, Blommaert and de Gruyter1999) that surrounded the officialization, aiming at a better understanding of the reasons behind the teachers’ drastic intervention in a linguistic matter, the RAE's and the government's authoritarian responses, and the loud resistance to the imposition of an official orthography in schools.

The controversy was not, interestingly enough, the first or even the most intense public debate involving the teachers’ association and governmental institutions in charge of developing public instruction. It took place, indeed, amidst a broader and deeper struggle to control teacher training – one of the chief domains of the ALCIP. The teachers’ association's monopoly of this activity had come to be jeopardized by the creation of normal schools – a project devised by Pablo Montesino and Antonio Gil de Zárate, and first put into practice in Madrid in 1839. The ALCIP, which, according to Gómez R. de Castro (1983: 50), aimed at monopolizing Madrid's public instruction, challenged the implementation and power of the normal schools by refusing to accept the supremacy of instructors trained in such institutions, by continuing to organize seminars for teachers and by spreading its critiques to Spain's educational policy through journals such as El Educador, Semanario de Instruczion Pública and La Academia (Melcón Beltrán Reference Melcón Beltrán1992: 135–43; Molero Pintado Reference Molero Pintado1994: 39–47).

It was, thus, not surprising to find that this broader context of struggle between the ALCIP and the central government permeated the debate over Spanish spelling. The legal documents emerging from the academicians’ reaction to the teachers’ association, for instance, reveal its political nature. The queen justified the government's intervention by identifying orthography as an issue of national interest: “all nations always proceed with extreme caution in such a delicate matter, preferring the advantages of a fixed and uniform orthography understood by all” (qtd. in Villalaín Benito Reference Villalaín Benito1997: 99–100). Having been declared “a concern of the state” (Rosenblat Reference Rosenblat and Bello1951: cxxiv), the Spanish language should remain in the state's hands and, therefore, be managed by an institution tied to the central government: the RAE. Following this rationale, the Royal Decrees empowered the institution as the corporation most authorized to judge linguistic matters, representing its members as the voices most qualified to dictate the norms of the national language (qtd. in Villalaín Benito Reference Villalaín Benito1997: 101).

The reaction from the teachers was loud: the ALCIP organized, in October of the same year, a public meeting to criticize the crown's imposition (Academia Literaria 1844), while some of its members wrote pamphlets against the RAE's norms and authority (Hernando Reference Hernando1845; Macias Reference Macias1846). If the legal documents justified the government's intervention with political arguments, the teachers relied on their professional experience to claim control over decision-making in educational spaces. In his refutation of the RAE's orthographic textbook, Victoriano Hernando wondered: “Is it likely that the government knows, understands and sees this situation? No sir, because it doesn't practice this profession. And what about the Council for Public Education? They do not either, for the same reason. And the Academy of the Spanish Language? They do not, unless some of its members have practiced teaching” (Hernando Reference Hernando1845: 21). Seniority in education would become not only a source of reaffirmation of the teachers’ association's authority but also, as Hernando's quote clearly states, a means to delegitimize novel central institutions.

There is still another salient strategy employed by the teachers in order to discredit their opponents: the negative portrayal of the imposition as a despotic and immoral (or even illegal) maneuver unbecoming to a democratic state. Manuel María Tobía, the secretary of the ALCIP, made this point in a straightforward way: “the government has just prohibited instructors to teach [the reformed system] under threat of a terrible punishment, despite the fact that such a mandate is openly opposed to the laws and regulations that govern us” (Academia Literaria 1844: 16). The accusation of excessive authoritarianism became, at times, extremely passionate and politicized. During the public meeting organized by the ALCIP a few months after the officialization, on October 3, 1844, the president of the teachers’ association even needed to call the audience to order when they loudly applauded and encouraged a Mr. Bona as he stated that “when governments speak they are not always right” (1844: 30). Regardless of the president's warnings, the speaker went on to stress the government's responsibility in political and popular uprisings because, he argued, “people that are happy do not revolt; and the best way for them to be happy is to give them freedom to secure their own education, the exercise of all their rights and their well-being through all possible means” (1844: 31).

This Mr. Bona, who so aggressively called for resistance to the government, was most likely Juan Eloy Bona y Ureta, a prominent Catalan economist, journalist and determined supporter of free trade. An honorary member of the ALCIP, he became – once settled in Madrid in the 1840s – a member of the city's Sociedad Económica Matritense, director of the widespread journal Eco del Comercio and co-founder of Madrid's Sociedad Libre de Economía Política (Román Collado Reference Román Collado2011: 700). His words in the meeting organized by the teachers to publicly oppose the imposition of the RAE's orthographic norm were praised by Francisco Salmerón y Alonso, another highly politicized participant, passionate supporter of freedom of instruction and fervent detractor of the state monopoly of education (Melcón Beltrán Reference Melcón Beltrán1992: 142). Mr. Salmerón expressed his liberal ideas in a journal that he co-edited, La Academia, a periodical publication that took the wheel from El Educador and Revista de Instruczion Pública and that would be accused of promoting ideas related to utopian socialism. This political activism at the heart of the educational debate is, according to Melcón Beltrán (Reference Melcón Beltrán1992: 143), a case where old-fashioned sectors of education and political radicals would join forces to attack the moderate government's policy.

The ALCIP fought, precisely, to win the battle over educational market niches and decision-making power against the emerging national public school system and administration. In that process the teachers displayed a number of strategies to resist the centralization intended by the government: from the organization of public debates to the circulation of their dissidence in a number of newspapers, and even through the sabotage of governmental institutions and measures. And, as we have seen, they did not even hesitate to align themselves with political opposition to the government coming from revolutionary groups.

The previous contextualization of the public debate over orthography challenges the traditional understanding of the teachers’ reformed system as a spontaneous and radical proposal, and the corresponding explanation of the government's response as a legitimate reaction to the instructors’ unacceptable interference in a field outside their competence. On the one hand, both the teachers’ intervention in this linguistic matter and their deep and loud resistance to the crown's imposition of the RAE's spelling system can be seen as further strategies to exacerbate public confrontation and to challenge the government's increasing accumulation of power and monopolization of educational spaces. On the other hand, the compelling response to the teachers’ independent initiative from the Council for Public Instruction was an effective measure to secure control over the standard language in education and, furthermore, became a display of the government's strength against decentralizing forces that would hinder the nationalization of public instruction.

The officialization of grammar

In addition to the spelling system, the RAE's grammatical norms were made official in Spain's schools in the central decade of the nineteenth century. Despite differences from the process that led to the officialization of orthography, the rationale behind the deliberate pursuit of an official recognition of grammar also responded to the centralization of education and control of the linguistic market. However, in this case, the RAE's struggle to become the recognized linguistic authority was fought not against the teachers’ association but against a number of competing grammars that had gained public acceptance and taken over the textbook market.

The RAE's intense grammatical work in the eighteenth century contrasts with the lack of productivity in this area in the first half of the nineteenth century (Fries Reference Fries1989; Sarmiento Reference Sarmiento1979, Reference Sarmiento, Quilis and Niederehe1986). By 1854, when the new edition of the RAE's grammar finally appeared, the prestige of the 1796 edition had considerably diminished and other grammars had filled the vacuum (Gómez Asencio 2002). The vitality of texts such as the Gramática de la lengua castellana segun ahora se habla [Grammar of the Castilian language as it is now spoken] (Salvá Reference Salvá1831) and the Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los Americanos [Grammar of the Castilian language for the use of the Americans] (Bello Reference Bello1951 [1847]) made it evident that the RAE was losing its hegemonic position. Moreover, the criticisms in those texts both of the institution's static norm and of its members’ lack of concern for the improvement of their grammar came to intensify the RAE's discredit: “the wise men who have constituted that corporation [the RAE] for the last sixty years” – stated Salvá reproving the academicians’ “lack of perseverance” and devotion to “more pleasant and glory-giving tasks” – were unable to fill “the many gaps of their Grammar until the present day” (Salvá Reference Salvá1831: XI).

The prominence and reputation of Salvá's and Bello's work had a tremendous impact on the Academy, so much so that they played a significant role in the revitalization of the grammatical activity within the institution and, therefore, in the resulting new edition of its Gramática de la lengua castellana (1854) and in the publication of its Epítome (1857b) and Compendio de la gramática castellana (1857a). The records from the academicians’ meetings themselves reveal the pressure they felt to work on a new improved grammar. In the notes from the meetings held during the first part of the nineteenth century, we find two moments of intense discussion over the necessity to take up the revision of the 1796 text again. The first one followed the publication of Salvá's grammar. Only six weeks after Diego Clemencín's depiction of Salvá's work as “judicious and appreciable,” the minutes from the February 21, 1833 meeting recorded that “the importance and urgency of reforming the Academy's Grammar was ultimately discussed.” The second instance of the need to issue a new grammar occurred right after the publication of Bello's Compendium of the Castilian grammar written for the use of the schools [Compendio de la gramática castellana escrito para el uso de las escuelas] (1884 [1851]). The minutes from the meeting held on September 4, 1851, recorded that Antonio Gil de Zárate, a prominent figure, as we have seen, in the process of affirmation of the RAE's linguistic authority, urged the corporation to actively devote itself to the elaboration of the Grammar. Since Bello's Compendio was a reduced grammatical text specifically targeting schools, it seems highly significant that the reminder of the importance of working on the grammar came this time from Antonio Gil de Zárate himself, an academician well connected with the government's educational institutions.

The pedagogical nature of the 1854 edition is in fact one of its distinctive qualities. In addition, the RAE's grammar shows a marked normative character and an acute awareness of the political importance of language. Because of these three salient characteristics, it can be considered, following Narvaja de Arnoux's typology (2008b), a state grammar. Rather than as a set of rules for language, grammar, due to its normalizing and unifying power, can be understood as a practice that disciplines individuals into citizenship. Accordingly, grammar becomes a foundational discourse of modern states (Ramos Reference Ramos1993: 18), which upholds both the practical and the symbolic realization of the nation.

This political nature of grammar and the challenge posed by other texts can explain the RAE's interest in the imposition of its Gramática. Parallel to the process of official recognition of its orthography, the corporation relied, once again, on its connections with the government and took advantage of the context of rapid and intense centralization of education. And, once more, they obtained the queen's support: on September 28, 1854, Isabella II signed a Royal Decree asserting that “having listened to the Royal Council for Public Instruction, and in accordance with its opinion, [the queen] has declared the new edition of the Grammar of the Castilian language made by the Royal Spanish Academy the textbook for public education, and stated that it is recommended to all schools and high-schools of the Kingdom” (qtd. in Villalaín Benito Reference Villalaín Benito1997: 156). Although this legal document did not yet entail a full imposition of the RAE's grammatical norm as mandatory and exclusive in education, its Gramática would enjoy, after this decree, not only official approval, but also the royal recommendation, a privilege not granted to other authorized textbooks at that time.

The concession of exclusivity to the RAE's grammatical norm would come three years later, hand in hand with Spain's first comprehensive educational law, the ley Moyano. Signed on September 9, 1857, the law stated that both the RAE's grammar and its orthography would be the mandatory and only norms to be taught in public education.³ The academicians’ privileged political position – which, we argue, facilitated this imposition – is made evident once more by the fact that they knew about the officialization even before the ratification of the law: the minutes from the RAE's meeting held six days before the ley Moyano was made public recorded the “need” to work on grammatical textbooks specifically targeting elementary and secondary education and entrusted the composition of an Epítome and a Compendio to Manuel Bretón de los Herreros (1796–1873) and Eugenio Hartzenbusch (1806–80), respectively.

The context of emergence of the RAE's 1854 Gramática and its 1857 Epítome and Compendio – and the understanding of grammar “as a cultural artifact intensely engaged in a dialogue with its times” (Del Valle Reference Del Valle2009: 885) – lead us to perceive the steps taken by the institution to gain official recognition of its grammatical norm as a strategy to recover their hegemonic status in the field. According to contemporary testimonies, the officialization of the grammar in 1857 did indeed entail the RAE's monopoly in education: only ten years later, Spanish printer and humanist Pascual Polo stated that “the language Academy has almost banned the introduction of any book other than its own on this subject [grammar] for elementary and secondary schools” (qtd. in Gómez Asencio 2004: 1322); and, by the end of the century, Simón Aguilar y Claramunt – a well-known Spanish pedagogue – asserted that “this Grammar, declared a mandatory and exclusive text by article 88 of the September 9, 1857 Law, has reigned supreme in official education, leaving other treatises on the matter only some hidden spots where they can, every now and then, raise deeply felt complaints” (qtd. in Calero Vaquera Reference Calero Vaquera1986: 269).

The RAE's control of the educational market became not only a permanent source of the corporation's authority but also a continuous source of income from the sale of grammar textbooks (Gómez Asencio 2004: 1316–21). According to the Marquis of Molins, director of the Academy between 1857 and 1868, more than one hundred thousand copies of the Compendio and seven hundred thousand copies of the Epítome had been printed by 1870 (Fries Reference Fries1989: 86). The economic stimulus they brought took place during one of the worst crises suffered by the institution, ending “the, until then, chronic financial misery in the Academy” (86) and, thus, considerably boosting “the flourish of its activities during the second half of the nineteenth century” (87).

Interestingly enough, the officialization of the RAE's grammatical norm did not trigger a public debate or meet the opposition that the official recognition of orthography had confronted. Spelling is certainly a more suitable matter for linguistic ideological discussions, but there is a more powerful reason to explain this lack of reaction from the educational community. The ALCIP – the organization that had actively rejected the imposition of the RAE's orthography – had been censured: “by Royal Decree on January 5, 1853, the suspension of the said Academy, as well as of the ones established in other provinces, was determined” (Academia de Maestros 1870: 5). The legal document that abolished those institutions justified the suspension of the teachers’ associations on the grounds of “the untimeliness and harm caused by the matters and conflicts that some of them have promoted, bringing discredit on themselves” (qtd. in Molero Pintado Reference Molero Pintado1994: 55). Antonio Gil de Zárate reappeared in this language-ideological debate to represent, in his salient De la Instruccion pública en España [Public instruction in Spain] (1855), the ALCIP and its members as sources of instability and decadence:

By suppressing the teachers’ associations, the government had erased dissident voices and, therefore, won the battle over control of Spain's educational market. However, while this erasure was certainly an effective method to succeed in the process of becoming Spain's linguistic authority, we have argued that there was still another issue that decisively worked in favor of the RAE: its deep connections with the government (Fries Reference Fries1989: 64–5). The excellent relations between the RAE and the administration have already been pointed out: on the one hand, it was once again the Council for Public Instruction – which included many members of the RAE – that was responsible for asking Queen Isabella II to give the 1854 grammatical text a special status; on the other, the academicians started to compose the 1857 Epítome and Compendio in order to satisfy the needs brought about by the ley Moyano even before the legal document was ratified. It seems reasonable to suggest that this coalition between state and RAE was embedded in the sociopolitical context of the nineteenth century: the linguistic institution relied on its relations with the government and, in turn, gave the state apparatus a state grammar that would reinforce the nation-building project by emphasizing normativity and offering a standard language for the nation (Narvaja de Arnoux Reference Arnoux2008b: 210).

Contextualization and conclusions

The nineteenth century stands out for the large number of measures designed and implemented in order to promote state power and Spain's nation-building project. The liberal, progressive and moderate political parties that governed Spain in the 1840s and 1850s took decisive steps in favor of economic development, the expansion of infrastructures, territorial reorganization, the administration's rebirth and the increase of power in the state's hands. During the central decades of Isabella II's reign, coinciding with the period covered by this chapter, the Spanish police force – Guardia Civil – was set up (1844), the Treasury was reformed with a new tax system (1845), a centralizing model was imposed over local and provincial administrations, the uniformity of the legal system began to be feasible thanks to the 1848 Penal Code, trade and communications were improved with the Railroad General Plan (1852) and the Railroad General Law (1855), the stock market was reorganized, the 1856 Banking Law was signed and the Bank of Spain was created (Arias Castañón Reference Arias Castañón, Manuel and Díaz1998: 33–7).

As part of this nation-building project and the subsequent centralization of state institutions, public education was also promoted as a strategic site to spread national practices and representations. In consequence, the nineteenth century witnessed the central government's recurrent efforts to consolidate a national school system by enacting education laws and establishing mechanisms to supervise public instruction. For instance, Madrid's Normal School [Escuela Normal de Madrid] and the Council for Public Instruction, in charge, respectively, of controlling teacher training and instructors’ practices, were instituted in 1839 and 1843. Regarding the legal underpinnings of education, several legislative initiatives – such as the ley Someruelos for elementary schools (1838) and the plan Pidal for secondary and university instruction (1845) – undertook a regulation of the public school system in the first half of the century that culminated in 1857 with the signing of the already mentioned ley Moyano (Puelles Benítez Reference Puelles Benítez1999, Reference Puelles Benítez2004).

This drastic intervention of the state in education brought about a deep reorganization of the market which entailed the rearrangement of structures of power and control over decision-making. In this context, the RAE began to position itself as Spain's linguistic authority and, along the way, accomplished a worthy goal: the officialization of its orthographic and grammatical norms in Spain's schools. The first two sections of this chapter have shown the coexistence of these two processes – namely, the rise of the RAE and the restructuring of education – by analyzing the public debate over orthography that involved the government, the RAE and the ALCIP. Following Blommaert (Reference Blommaert, Blommaert and de Gruyter1999), I have characterized it as a language-ideological debate and placed the focus of analysis on “human agency, political intervention, power and authority” (5). While language is undoubtedly a central topic in this orthographic episode, the debate itself is also “part of more general sociolinguistic processes,…sociopolitical developments, conflicts and struggles” (2). As we have shown, it reproduces a wider controversy among different approaches to Spain's nation-building project as well as the struggle between the state's centralization initiatives and the non-governmental organizations’ resistance to its rapidly increasing accumulation of power.

Literacy, as this orthographic episode clearly shows, should be understood as a political matter rather than as a merely technical activity (Woolard Reference Woolard, Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998: 23). Discussion of specific linguistic features was, indeed, almost completely absent in our corpus. Instead, the participants in this debate put forward a great many arguments to defend the legitimacy of their dictation of the norms of linguistic correction in education. It seems evident, then, that this debate goes beyond the limits of the linguistic terrain: the control over educational spaces is what is really at stake (Villa Reference Villa, Langer, Davies and Vandenbussche2011). The main goal of this study has been, precisely, to bring to the forefront the sociopolitical environment surrounding the emergence of the standard spelling system that, with minor changes, is still accepted and widely used today in the Spanish-speaking world. Placing the political context at the heart of the analysis has led us to emphasize the agency of all parties involved in the debate, and, thus, to consider both the teachers’ simplification initiative and the RAE's officialization as disputed and ideologically laden projects.

The competition to control language and education inclined to the RAE and the central government. The third section of this chapter has studied the officialization of grammar in close connection with the sociopolitical context of mid-nineteenth-century Spain. The revitalization of grammatical activity within the corporation and the steps taken by its members to give their norms an officially recognized special status have been understood not as part of a neutral standardization process but rather as purposeful movements to occupy a hegemonic position in the linguistic market. The analysis concluded that the exceptional relations of the RAE with the government and other state institutions, particularly educational ones, were determinant for achieving the officialization of its grammar (and its orthography), for erasing the resistance to its project and, thus, for confirming its authority in language. In fact, those links were so strong in the central decades of the nineteenth century that we barely find academicians that did not hold, at some point in their lives, positions of responsibility in Spain's administration: members of parliament, ministers, directors of the National Library, of the General Direction of Public Instruction, and presidents of the Ministers’ Council swelled the ranks of the RAE between 1843 and 1857.

Placing the focus on the political history of standard Spanish, this chapter has unveiled a historical struggle behind the emergence of linguistic authorities and official norms in the central years of the nineteenth century that has often been neglected in traditional representations of the historiography of Spanish. Dominant discourses on the history of standard Spanish have actually contributed to a neutralization of its context of emergence and to a naturalization of the linguistic norms and authorities themselves by erasing the RAE's agency in the historical process. This chapter, in contrast, has paid attention to the crucial role that the institution as a whole and some particular academicians, such as Antonio Gil de Zárate, played in achieving the officialization of its orthographic and grammatical norms, as well as to their active participation in the struggle over the monopolization of the linguistic and educational markets in mid-nineteenth-century Spain. Discussion over the institutionalization of the Spanish language is, of course, not a process exclusive to the period covered by this study; quite the opposite, contestation from different sources – powerful groups within Spain, Spain's periphery movements and Latin American intellectuals – would actually increase in the following decades (Del Valle and Gabriel-Stheeman Reference Del Valle, del Valle and Gabriel-Stheeman2004; many contributions to this volume). However, the 1840s and 1850s deserve more scholarly attention because they witnessed the development of a strong alliance between the state and the RAE. The former granted the cultural institution a special status and a national character that made it possible for the corporation to become Spain's linguistic authority, for its norms to be made mandatory and for its activities to be invigorated thanks to an economic growth. The RAE, in turn, provided Spain's political authorities with a standard language that made it possible to develop the nation (both in its material and symbolic dimensions) and to form the national citizens through the public school system – as Antonio Gil de Zárate's passionate statement on the ideological potential of education suggests.

Unamuno: ‘The discursive creator of the Spanish Republic’

Unamuno, arguably the most influential Spanish intellectual of his time, made a series of public interventions on the topics that concern us in this chapter. He delivered three important parliamentary speeches: one in September–October 1931, in the context of the constitutional debates, and two in July 1932, in the parliamentary debates about Catalan self-government. In the constitutional debates he voiced his opposition to devolution and the regions’ self-government, and expressed his preference for a centralized state (1931i). In line with these views, he submitted a couple of constitutional amendments, one against the full recognition of languages other than Spanish (Unamuno Reference Unamuno1931j), the other about the powers to be devolved to the regions and the languages to be used in education (1931k).² Regarding the Estatuto de Autonomía de Cataluña, he filed one amendment about the official status of Catalan (1932c) and another about the proposed powers over education to be devolved to the Catalan government (1932d).

Unamuno also voiced his views in numerous journalistic columns, where he reiterated and expanded on the views he expressed in parliament. He contributed thus to shaping Spanish public opinion on these matters, although he repeatedly argued that he was merely acting as a spokesperson for the common views of the public.³ Thus, on the one hand, in one of his speeches he claimed to be a privileged representative of the whole nation (“I don't want to say on behalf of whom I am speaking; it might seem smug if I say that I am speaking here on behalf of Spain,” the emphasis is ours), but, on the other hand, he admitted he was aware of “his share of responsibility in shaping Spanish public opinion” (2008: 1034, 1048). Moreover, at the end of this speech he claims to be surprised at the excessively passionate turn the debates on language had taken, failing to mention the role he himself had played in arousing such passions (2008: 1058).

As we will see below, his reference to the inflamed passions of the general public is a characteristic feature in the discourses of those who were reluctant, if not directly opposed, to grant official recognition to the so-called regional languages. Unamuno was indeed the leader of a faction of parliamentary hardliners who championed opposition to the rights of minority languages.

National religion, language worship and imperialism

Unamuno wanted to transfer to the Republic the intellectual and political projects of his own generation, the so-called Generation of 98, to which scholars attributed the “invention of Spain” (Fox Reference Fox1997; Varela Reference Varela1999: 9–16, 145–76). In particular, he tried to endow Spanish and national identity with a kind of mystic aura (Resina Reference Resina, del Valle and Gabriel-Stheeman2002). On this point his discourse displays two of the characteristic traits of modern nationalist discourse: the displacement of the sacred from religion to politics (Álvarez Junco Reference Álvarez Junco and García Delgado1993) and the “ethnicization of the polity” (Grillo Reference Grillo1980 and 1989: 23–9). Thus, he described the process that turned Spain into a nation as a substitution of national culture for the monarchy and Catholicism as defining features of collective identity. Unamuno himself contributed significantly, along many other liberal nationalist intellectuals, to the project of nationalization of Spanish culture. As he says: “the State – and this is the heart of liberalism – must play an active role in the field of culture, especially against the church. The cultural struggle, Kulturkampf, becomes a necessity.”⁴ In Unamuno scholarship it has become almost a commonplace to emphasize his attempts to infuse politics with religious rhetoric (Rabaté and Rabaté Reference Rabaté and Rabaté2009: 317). Indeed, he once described his own political role as being that of a “culture priest” (2008: 1066).

In his press columns Unamuno repeatedly praised “popular, secular, national and traditional” religion, which constituted for him the “soul of the nation.”⁵ The most sacred dogma in this religious version of Spanish nationalism is that of national unity, which, in his view, was achieved through divine will (Unamuno 1979: 103). The historical process that led to the unity of Spain is seen as the teleological development of a God-given plan. This is the reason why Spanish history, because of its divine origins and transcendental status, becomes an object of worship. “The nation, the fatherland,” he claimed, “is kept alive through our worshipping of History, of a past which is unchanging, of an eternal past which at the same time is an eternal present and an eternal future, which is eternity itself, history itself. Worshipping the dead is worshipping not death, but immortality” (1979: 92, 131). It is difficult to find a clearer formulation of his understanding of the nation: since it belongs to the realm of the sacred, the nation has a non-historical and non-temporal essence which is immortal and eternal, and lies beyond human reach (1979: 97).

Unamuno rejects Rousseau's theory of the social contract, including the doctrine of federalism (1979: 81–2, 103), holding instead that national unity must be achieved after a free confrontation between the constitutive groups, whereby the winner, as the strongest group, imposes its language and culture on the others. In practice, in the case of Spain the main contenders are Castile and Catalonia, both of which, in conjunction with all the other regions, must try to dominate all the other peoples: “let them conquer us, or let us all conquer each other” (2008: 1045).⁶ This is the reason he opposes an agreement with Catalan nationalists: “With this we want to avoid civil war. Some civil wars lead to true unity between peoples. Before civil war, unity is false, after civil war there is true unity” (2008: 1069). Unamuno's idea of a reciprocal conquering between the various peoples of Spain seems to be either a utopian wish or else simply an attempt to legitimate the right of the strongest group to culturally “conquer” the others.

Now if history acts as a guarantee for the transcendence of the nation, the Castilian language is a kind of thread “uniting the historical generations, making continuity possible.” The language creates a “human, historical, spiritual race [raza],” it is “what turns us into a community, what creates our communion through space and time” (1984: 121). Closely connected with this is the idea of Spanish/Castilian as the spiritual foundation of the Spanish Empire: “Who cares if a part of our spiritual community or spiritual race [raza espiritual] is split politically from us, if it continues to think by means of our spiritual blood, by means of our language?” (1984: 122). Furthermore, this worship of language is not just an integral part of the national religion, as it also becomes a kind of religion of empire: “there is religiousness in language. And this religiousness is an integral part of the great Hispanic race [raza hispánica] on both sides of the Atlantic” (1984: 122–3). We see here how Spanish linguistic nationalism takes on an imperial character, not just with regard to the Americas, but also inside the Iberian Peninsula itself (Del Valle and Gabriel-Stheeman Reference del Valle, José del and Gabriel-Stheeman2002b: 6–7).

National sentiment versus regional resentment

The sacred unity of Spain is projected into the future as a shared Spanish national mission. Unamuno uses such a notion in order to differentiate the noble sentiment associated with the sacredness of the Spanish nation-state from the regional resentment which he sees negatively insofar as it challenges the former. Thus, in a parliamentary discussion about the official character of the other languages of Spain, Unamuno started by recognizing that “this issue lies, no doubt, at the very heart of national unity and is what most arouses national sentiment,” to conclude in a lyrical tone with a celebration of a sort of mystical fusion of his own body with the transcendental nation, embodied in its History, its land and its language. It is with the final rest in the bosom of the motherland, when historical time is suspended, that the survival of the Spanish language ensures his individual transcendence:

Unamuno's passion for Spanish, indeed the pathos of religious communion with the language, the nation and the soil, so vividly expressed in this quotation, contrasts starkly with the little affection he showed for “regional” languages. Indeed, he even denounces the excess of sentimentality in which regional language supporters allegedly indulge: “I want to make it clear that I will avoid the sentimental tone which, regrettably, has often accompanied discussion of these issues”; “supporters of non-official, regional languages have all too often approached this issue sentimentally, rather than politically” (2008: 1107–8). For him, “the so-called personality of the regions” is to a great extent no more than a “sentimental myth” (1979: 83). His contrast between sentimientos and resentimientos briefly encapsulates his opposed feelings for the different languages of Spain, the positive sentiment he associates with Castilian and Spain versus “local resentment” (1979: 98), which is peculiar to regional “resentful peoples” (1979: 93–4). Sometimes his dislike for regional languages is voiced in a hardly disguised aggressive tone: “I believe one must hurt sentiment and resentment,” he once said in a discussion about the topic in focus (2008: 1034).

He encapsulates the plight of both the Spanish nation and the Spanish language in a powerful metaphor: Spain as a crucified Jesus. Thus, just like the inscription on the cross, which was written in three languages, so Spain was being turned into a “trilingual country,” where everything is going to be written “in the languages that divided parents from their children, brothers and sisters from their brothers and sisters, in the languages of particular sentiment and resentment, instead of the Spanish language, which has a universal, imperial sense” (1984: 72). It should not come as a surprise that just a few months after its proclamation he expressed (Unamuno 1979: 88–9) his feeling of distance toward the Republic specifically because it granted regional autonomy and official status to regional languages.⁸

Language struggle and bilingualism

Unamuno found academic and scientific backing for his linguistic nationalism in biology, more specifically in evolutionary doctrines about the survival of the fittest. The history of languages is, according to this view, modeled on nature and is ultimately determined by biological laws (Huarte Morton Reference Huarte Morton1954: 90–2). This is the reason why Unamuno believes that any attempt at modifying natural development of languages through social and political intervention is doomed to fail (2008: 1114). Herbert Spencer's social doctrines were reinforced and complemented by the positivist faith in the progressive character of the laws of human development leading inescapably towards the unity of the whole of humanity. The idea that the whole of humanity would one day speak one single language was a corollary of the belief in the future unity of the human race (Williams Reference Williams1992: 1–8, 16–17).

The bulk of Unamuno's ideas on the question of language unity were already present in a speech he gave at the Poetry Floral Games (Juegos Florales) in Bilbao in 1901, where he made explicit his belief in a natural teleological plan inevitably leading to a final state of linguistic unity. He cautions, however, that this process of progressive development toward unity “cannot be imposed extemporaneously or from the outside by force. Self-interest alone will achieve what cannot be achieved by means of governmental decisions” (Unamuno Reference Unamuno1968: 241). This is the reason why he opposes any legal and political decision that might interfere with this natural tendency towards unity. Thus, although he opposed the repression exerted on minority languages under Primo de Rivera, he firmly believed that the hegemony of Spanish was a historical necessity, and therefore became a fierce opponent of the policies of official recognition for “regional” languages: “official status should not be granted to any language other than Castilian, the national language” (Unamuno Reference Unamuno1966: 436). So Unamuno's attitude of tolerance towards “regional” languages must be understood in the sense that he trusted that, through natural selection, the “national” language would prevail in the end (Juaristi Reference Juaristi1997: 65–135).

Unamuno understands that this process of unification will come about spontaneously through the fusion of the weakest with the strongest languages: “The problem of the multiplicity of languages will be solved through integration, perhaps through reduction to a multiplicity of styles within one common language. Dialects should not be repressed, just allowed to fuse with the strongest language, in accordance with the laws of nature” (Unamuno 2008: 963–4). This idea of evolution through fusion of languages, borrowed from pre-comparative linguistics, allows Unamuno to present “Spanish” not simply as a more developed form of “Castilian,” but as a sort of ongoing synthesis of all the languages of the Peninsula (2008: 1101). He sees bilingualism merely as a transition stage which will sooner or later lead to language assimilation, this being another reason for his stubborn stance against the official recognition of bilingualism: “official recognition of bilingualism,” he says, “is nonsense and fighting assimilation is a disaster” (1979: 82–3). Thus, in order to justify his opposition to the recognition of co-official status for Catalan, he argues that since this is a question of language biology, “lawmakers have no business here.” Further, he has recourse to the alleged authority of science to claim that there is no true bilingual country anywhere: “when a country is allowed to become bilingual, it ends up by, first, mixing up the two languages and, finally, by combining them till they fuse into one” (2008: 1104).⁹

Rather than an academic philologist, Unamuno was an ideologue of language or, as he has been called, a “language priest” (Huarte Morton Reference Huarte Morton1954: 7–29). Jon Juaristi claims that Unamuno, “in his self-appointed mission as a bard, prevented other possible discourses about the Basques to emerge and gain public recognition” (Juaristi Reference Juaristi1997: 107). I would claim that this is also what he tried to achieve in the language field: to prevent the emergence of alternative, more egalitarian and democratic discourses that might challenge the hegemony of Spanish.

Ramón Menéndez Pidal: the Spanish language and the Spanish nation

In parliamentary debates Menéndez Pidal was often quoted as a universally recognized scientific authority on historical and linguistic matters. Indeed, his authoritative accounts of the history of Spain and of the Spanish language were met with such wide acclaim that by that time they had arguably acquired canonical status. The narratives he constructed, however, were not ideologically neutral (Del Valle Reference Del Valle, José del and Gabriel-Stheeman2002a). In fact, it could be said that his historical narratives provide the single most important intellectual contribution to the ideological underpinning of modern Spanish nationalism (Abellán Reference Abellán1993: vol. VII, 203–7 and Varela Reference Varela1999: 238–50). It is not surprising, then, that he was often quoted in support of the view of Spain as a single nation-state under the hegemony of Castilian Spanish, and against granting rights to the other languages of Spain. For example, the Castilian MP Antonio Royo Villanova repeatedly quoted Menéndez Pidal in support of his amendment to keep a clear reference to the sovereignty of “la Nación Española” (the Spanish Nation) in the final draft of the Constitution. According to Royo's views, the national character of Spain is something “unquestionable, unavoidable” (Mori Reference Mori1932: vol. II, 54), unlike Catalonia which, for him, is not a nation, because it is simply grounded in the possession of a different language. For him, the mere existence of a language is not sufficient to ground a nation: “the nation is not the language,” he claimed; rather, “what makes a nation is national consciousness” (Mori Reference Mori1932: vol. II, 56).

At first sight, it might seem surprising to find that someone like Menéndez Pidal was quoted, from a centralist perspective, to the effect that nations were not simply grounded in language. In fact, this might not be considered surprising if we bear in mind that for him nations are defined primarily by ethnic and racial elements – including psychological traits – and the privileged mode of expression of their national spirit is literature, rather than language (Menéndez Pidal Reference Menéndez Pidal1962 [1921]: 14–15). However, it is interesting to note that this rejection of the link between language and nation always takes place in the context of debates and controversies about the national character of “regions” like Catalonia (Monteagudo Reference Monteagudo and Rodríguez2000b).

Our eminent philologist argues, however, for a Spanish national character in a couple of articles published in the newspaper El Sol.¹⁰ Menéndez Pidal rejects the idea, put forward by Catalan nationalists, that Spain is a state but not a single nation. As he puts it, Spain is “the most homogeneous of the greatest European nations in linguistic and racial terms,” clearly differentiated from the “heterogeneous and autocratic” empires with which “extremist nationalisms” – meaning peripheral nationalisms – want to associate it (1931a). He argues that the Spanish nation was constituted historically, well established from around the thirteenth century (1931b). In this narrative, he accords Castile a leading role: “[Castile] had a clear vision for great collective endeavours, and its hegemony was well deserved in historical terms, rather than a product of mere chance.” Menéndez Pidal believed in the cultural superiority of Castile over the other peoples of Spain, and the metaphor he chose to express it was unambiguous: Castile reached “the highest peaks in the curve of culture in Spain” (1931a), which endowed her with a “stronger power of attraction and assimilation over the other peninsular peoples.” He insisted that the spread of Castilian over the Peninsula had nothing to do with the political hegemony of Castile. For him it was a merely cultural phenomenon, as he explicitly emphasized “the non-political character of the spread of the central language over the regions” (1931a).¹¹

Further, Menéndez Pidal also made use of a purportedly scientific argument borrowed from historical linguistics to support his thesis of a natural, age-old tendency for all peninsular language varieties to fuse with central Castilian. He invoked the linguistic map of the north of the Peninsula which, instead of sharp linguistic frontiers, displays large grey transition zones where the different language varieties mingle with each other. This for him is evidence of “the centuries-old phenomenon of the mixing of all Peninsular cultures, of the fusion of the peripheral languages with the central language” (1931a). We have already encountered this notion of a kind of natural and spontaneous drift towards unity in Unamuno. Menéndez Pidal is making a similar point here, this time grounding unity on the allegedly objective facts provided by historical linguistics, but fails to provide a convincing explanation for this natural “spontaneous drift” towards unity and fusion with Castilian.

Menéndez Pidal generally had a more tolerant attitude toward the other Spanish languages than Unamuno and was better disposed toward their official recognition and introduction in school curricula. Although he could be considered a moderate supporter of the policies of bilingualism, he always insisted that the “bilingual regions” like Galicia, the Basque Country and Catalonia should never attempt to get rid of Spanish, and this for two reasons. First, Spanish was part and parcel of these region's identities as a result of their “centuries-old coexistence,” and secondly, Spanish could counter “regional parochialism,” given that it was a widely spoken language. Thus, Menéndez Pidal underscored the role of the school as a guarantee for the survival of Spanish in these “regions” (1931a).

The state, through its educational institutions, is entrusted with the mission of bolstering national consciousness. If this mission fails, then the preexisting Spanish nation runs the risk of collapsing and turning simply into…a state. There is something paradoxical here. On the one hand, Menéndez Pidal seems to be simply asserting an essentialist concept of the Spanish nation, insofar as he sees it as the result of an unproblematic and natural process of historical development, as we saw above. On the other hand, the very existence of the nation seems to depend on the political role of the state in bolstering national consciousness. It is true that, in his historical and linguistic narratives, he used concepts like “hegemony” and “prestige,”¹² which correctly point to the central role of politics. However, he never quite abandoned the sharp distinction between culture and politics, and the paradox remained.

Articles 4 and 48/50 of the Constitution

In order to give readers a better understanding of the context in which these debates took place, I will briefly summarize the process of elaboration of the new republican constitution (Jiménez de Asúa Reference Jiménez de Asúa1932). Shortly after the proclamation of the Republic, the provisional government appointed a Technical Committee with the task of writing a first draft for the new constitution. Later, another committee was appointed by the newly elected parliament with the charge of writing the final draft of the constitution, which was to be submitted for discussion, amendment and approval at plenary sessions in parliament. We already mentioned the dispute caused by the use of the term “nation” in the preamble, but the most important controversies arouse in connection with discussion of articles 4 and 48 of the final draft (4 and 50 in the definitive text of the constitution), dealing, respectively, with the official standing of Castilian vis-à-vis the other languages, and the devolution of education powers to regional governments, which included the power to decide on educational language policies.

From our point of view it is interesting to consider the significant differences between all three versions of the constitution – that is, the first draft, the final draft and the definitive text. It should be recalled that as the constitution was under elaboration, in Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia preparatory work had already started towards writing their respective estatutos de autonomía, all of which included articles relative to language. The amendments to articles 4 and 48/50 which appear in the final draft and the definitive version all go in the direction of limiting the devolution of power to the regions and securing a higher legal status for Castilian to the detriment of the other languages. These changes and amendments were proposed by all state-wide majority parties, both left-wing and right-wing. It seems surprising that representatives of peripheral nationalist parties did not propose any amendments (with the exception of Galician nationalists: Monteagudo 2000a and 2000b) or participate much in parliamentary debates.

Of the seven proposals to amend article 4, just one was accepted for consideration (DSCCRE 40–1).¹³ One of the most restrictive amendments for “regional” languages was put forward by a liberal group called Al Servicio de la República [In the Service of the Republic], to which Unamuno and other well-known intellectuals belonged. Unamuno himself was responsible for proposing and defending this amendment which, after discussion in parliament, was approved and included in the definitive version of the constitution. Thus, article 4 of the final text reads:

Regarding article 48/50, there were ten proposed amendments (DSCCRE 60–1; see Jiménez de Asúa Reference Jiménez de Asúa1932: 308–17 and Azaña Reference Azaña1981: vol. I, 244–7). Alongside Unamuno, Albornoz played a leading role in the discussion of amendments and in the negotiation of the final contents of this article, which was the result of an agreement between centre-left republicans and Catalan nationalists:

Unamuno is responsible, to a great extent, for including both the obligation for all Spaniards to know Castilian in article 4 and the obligation for bilingual regions to provide education with Spanish as a medium of instruction. This was an important precedent for the 1978 constitution, which also includes the obligation to know Castilian. As for the question of the availability of education in Spanish in Catalan schools, it is no less well known that it has constantly been an object of concern – and media hype – for Spanish nationalism since the Generalitat (the Catalan government) started to implement Catalan immersion policies.

Parliamentary debates: intransigent versus conciliatory stances

One striking aspect of the parliamentary debates is the relatively low-key participation of representatives from peripheral nationalisms, who apparently preferred to work behind the scenes and reach agreements with other groups than to engage in public controversies. In the course of debates, two main positions emerged among representatives of majority state-wide parties: first, the intransigent stance of those who, like Unamuno, strongly opposed both regional devolution and the co-official recognition of Basque, Catalan and Galician. A second group of MPs showed a more conciliatory attitude, accepting both a certain form of decentralization of state power and some form of legal recognition to languages other than Spanish. Their priority was to consolidate the republican regime, and, in order to achieve this, it was important for them to include peripheral nationalists into the constitutional agreement, especially the influential Catalan left nationalists.

Critical MPs often justified their intransigent stance by arguing that they were simply acting as spokespersons for the whole of Spain, as Unamuno did, usually equating Spanish public opinion with Castilian public opinion. There were constant warnings about the importance of these issues and the possible alarm these might cause to the public. Manuel Azaña, prime minister, Castilian MP and leader of a left-wing republican group, warned about the risk of inflaming the passions of the public: “there is nothing more sensitive, nothing which causes more irritation, than the language question” (DSCCRE 61: 1891). Along these lines, other MPs insisted on the centrality of language for more general questions about identity, sovereignty, power and nationality. Within the critical or intransigent camp, use of apocalyptic rhetoric and alarmist tone were frequent, for example when they talked of “relinquishing the cultural mission of the state,” “abandoning our centuries-old spiritual heritage,” and even of “high treachery.”

While for critics of devolution and minority language rights the hegemony of Spanish was a necessary condition to guarantee Spain's spiritual unity, the feared risk of dismemberment was downplayed by the conciliatory camp, which emphasized instead that a tolerant official attitude towards other languages could be helpful for establishing a new sense of peaceful coexistence among all Spaniards. As Albornoz, one of the most distinguished “conciliatory” MPs, put it: “Spain already has geographical, racial, cultural and spiritual unity, and it also has unity of destiny.” He does not see recognition of language and political rights to minorities as a threat to the common national project: “only if we concede maximum liberties and maximum recognition to regional languages will we all be able to feel comfortable within this State we are all helping to build” (DSCCRE 61: 1884–7). Note, though, that he speaks of conceding, from a position of superiority, recognition to regional languages.

In spite of these differences, both intransigent and conciliatory MPs, from the left and from the right, still had quite a lot in common, as they all relied on the then dominant narrative about the linguistic history of Spain. Andrés Ovejero, a socialist MP and a literature professor at the University of Madrid, went the furthest in this direction when he claimed that “our Castilian language was already an official language in Catalonia and Navarre two centuries before they were politically united with Castile” (DSCCRE 40: 994), something which flies in the face of all historical evidence. Albornoz, more cautiously but no less significantly, ascribed the hegemony of Castilian to the “genius” of the “race,” again displacing the causes of the process from the sociopolitical field into an allegedly detached realm of learned high culture:

There were numerous alarmist warnings coming from the intransigent camp about the catastrophic consequences that official recognition of Catalan, Basque and Galician would bring about. Thus, Abilio Calderón suggested that all action which was not aimed at defending Castilian was “detrimental to our language, hurtful to our patriotic feelings and prejudicial to our moral and economic interests.” And, characteristically, he also warned of the risk of Spain becoming a new Tower of Babel, at the same time as Spanish disappeared from Catalonia in a single generation (DSCCRE 40: 990–1). From the conciliatory camp they replied that these fears were unjustified. Eduardo Ortega, for example, expressed his total faith in “the vitality, the biological, universal force of Castilian, which must always prevail under any circumstances” (DSCCRE 61: 1897). Along similar lines, according to Albornoz, Castilians should not be concerned in the slightest about the future of their language, since the latter's future is “absolutely guaranteed.” Albornoz does not fear for the unity of Spain either, as he believes the latter will always exist as long as this world exists. He even trusts that “Castilian culture will flourish in Catalonia the moment they stop seeing it as imposed” (DSCCRE 61: 1884–7).

As we see in these quotations, the question was often presented in terms of a confrontation between Castilian culture, often equated with Spanish culture, and Catalan culture. This is consistent with the already mentioned fact that some of the MPs seemed to be acting as Castilian MPs, rather than Spanish MPs. “It is the state's duty to protect and to teach Castilian culture,” said the conservative Miguel Maura, who also reproached Catalan nationalist representatives “trying to impose your Catalan spirit at your universities, to the exclusion of the Castilian spirit” (DSCCRE 61: 1889–1). On hearing this reproach, Manuel Azaña himself replied angrily: “Catalan culture is as Spanish as our culture, and both are an integral part of this country and this Republic” (DSCCRE 61: 1892–3).¹⁴

The old question of the name of the language, español or castellano, was also debated in relation to proposed amendments of article 4. In fact, perhaps this apparently inconsequential question of the naming of the language encapsulates better than anything else the true political stakes of this whole debate. Initially, Spanish seems to have been the preferred option for a majority. Nationalists from the peripheries rejected this and claimed that the other languages should also be considered Spanish languages. The Galician Daniel Castelao, for example, argued that Galician should be considered “as Spanish a language as Castilian” (DSCCRE 41: 1013–14), and the Catalan Gabriel Alomar went further when he complained that equating Castilian and Spanish was an “insult” to Catalonia and the other regions: “my Catalan language, Basque and Galician are all Spanish languages” (DSCCRE 40: 996–7). In the end castellano, Castilian, was the preferred choice for both Castilian centralists and peripheral nationalists, although probably for opposite reasons.

Conclusion: “the heart of national unity”

We have identified a contradiction at the heart of what we have termed the “intransigent” discourse. On the one hand, they assert the inherent, natural superiority of Castilian language and culture, denying thereby that politics, in the form of state intervention, had played a major role in bringing about this region's hegemony. One wonders why, then, they opposed official recognition for the other languages so vehemently. One cannot avoid the feeling that their insistence on preserving the privileged position of Spanish in education and other state-related domains reveals that they believed, more than they were prepared to admit, that the political action of the state is ultimately determining for achieving language hegemony. This could be the best way to refute their thesis about the intrinsic superiority of Castilian, pointing instead to the true political factors lying behind its hegemony. On this point the conciliatory camp seems to have been more consistent: they were convinced that no form of official recognition of the other languages would be enough to challenge the superior strength of Castilian language and culture.¹⁵

We have pointed out that MPs’ stances towards the regional languages were not strictly matched with any political ideology or political party, as intransigent and conciliatory positions cut across the ideological spectrum. Nevertheless, generally speaking, liberal and center-left groups (where Azaña and Albornoz belonged) showed a better disposition than both conservative and leftist groups. That said, the two stances had more in common than might appear at first sight; their differences were more a matter of political tactics than of conviction. The intransigent camp insisted that the state should not hesitate to facilitate – rather than hinder – the process of linguistic “unification” already under way, whereas the conciliatory position viewed such an approach as dubiously democratic and strategically counterproductive. First, it could be an obstacle to the incorporation of peripheral nationalisms into the republican project and, secondly, a language policy openly restrictive could trigger a counter-reaction, as happened with Primo de Rivera's repressive measures (Ventalló Reference Ventalló1976).

The weakest point in the argument of the conciliatory camp was the lack of a truly pluralist cultural discourse which could have acted as a real alternative to dominant centralist and nationalist stands. Such a discourse was not available in the Spanish intellectual and academic contexts of that time. Philology, imbued as it was with nationalist ideas, was probably unable to provide it. As a consequence, the foundations of the linguistic ideology that furnished their discourses were shared by both camps. First, they all shared the idea of a monolingual culture which, explicit denials aside, ultimately subordinates language and culture to the state. Secondly, the hegemony of Spanish is unquestionably assumed to be based on the superiority of the Castilian language and raza. The spread of Spanish in the Peninsula is presented as a natural fact, the result of a spontaneous historical tendency towards unification, driven by an inexorable law of progress. This process is further legitimized through references to biological science, bringing Darwinian ideas about the survival of the fittest into the field of language. In this connection, it is interesting to note their respective attitudes towards bilingualism: while Unamuno rejected it head-on, Menéndez Pidal and Albornoz said they were in favor of it (however, their position is quite ambiguous and somehow half-hearted, and ultimately seems to be based on tactical calculation rather than firm conviction). Finally, one cannot avoid the feeling that, whatever their differences, they were all convinced that Spanish would end up replacing all the other languages, turning Spain into a monolingual country, which, in their eyes, would make it a stronger nation.

We have underscored the role intellectuals like Menéndez Pidal and Unamuno played, first, in underpinning the hegemonic Spanish nationalist discourse on language and, second, in legitimizing political and legal regulations that were in accordance with that discourse. However, they differ markedly. As an unquestioned academic authority, Menéndez Pidal's could be characterized as a cold, rational discourse, in the sense that it is intellectually solid and anchored in the scientific field. Unamuno, in contrast, was an acclaimed writer, and his discourse on language displayed poetic and lyrical overtones. It is weaker than Menéndez Pidal's, perhaps, from a strictly rational position, but strongly appealing from an emotional point of view. They could be said to embody two slightly different versions of the same nationalist discourse on the Spanish language and the Spanish nation. Menéndez Pidal's, in its ambiguity, proved to be appealing for both the intransigent and the conciliatory stances. Unamuno's, on the other hand, having a more openly nationalistic overtone, proved more appealing to the intransigent stance. In any case, the notoriety these and other intellectuals enjoyed is not totally unrelated to the political centrality of the language controversy, in the same way that the passion with which they defended Spanish cannot be totally detached from their own material and particular interests as a social group (Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm1991: 127).

Finally, the achievement of co-official recognition for the smaller Spanish languages alongside Castilian for the first time in Spanish history was the result of an agreement between the conciliatory camp and peripheral nationalists, reached through a complex and protracted negotiation. The conciliatory discourse towards the other languages of Spain opened up a new path which made it possible to pursue peaceful dialogue between Castilian language and culture and the other languages and cultures of Spain, for the first time questioning the hitherto dominant monolingual hegemonic culture. For their part, representatives from peripheral nationalisms did not play such a central role in these debates as one would have expected given the nature of the topics that were discussed. Instead, they seem to have preferred to concentrate their efforts on the elaboration of their respective statutes of autonomy.

Be that as it may, official recognition in the Constitution of the other Spanish languages was an important first step in the direction of constructing new, more inclusive and pluralistic discourses in Spanish culture, a path which, as we know, was sadly truncated by the fascist coup in 1936, the civil war and Franco's subsequent dictatorship. Within the few years that the Second Republic lasted, there was not enough time for the practical effects of the new official arrangement to be fully felt, except briefly in Catalonia. In any case, it constituted an important legal precedent for the 1978 Constitution. But that is another story.