Hello. In the Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was February 9th, 1387. My name is Jonathan
Seyfried. I'm a PhD candidate in history at the
University of New Mexico. And this is the Historian's
Notebook, a podcast about how history gets made.
Season one is titled Molt Cara Companyona. We're
looking at a document from each day of the first
year of the reign of King Joan I of Aragon and
Queen Violant de Bar. Let's begin today's document.
At the start of the episode today, I want to
give a shout out to my dad. It's his birthday
today. Happy birthday, dad. All right. So in
addition to it being my dad's birthday, this
is also the date of a little letter in the secret
seal register of Violant de Bar. This is one
of the shorter letters that we'll be working
on this podcast season. I think it's probably
the shortest one thus far at about this is at
four lines so I don't think we've had a document
this short before and when I saw it I thought
to myself oh this this won't be too difficult
it's very short oh no there was a challenge with
this letter because i cannot for the life of
me figure out who it's addressed to and i looked
at the folio before and i looked at the letters
following they do not seem to be related they're
on different days and this one is the only February
9th letter around for Violant. So even the dating
of it is weird because the scribe has chosen
to put down the letter nine as Roman numeral
five followed by four i's. So V -I -I -I -I.
Which is not usually what I see. Usually when
I see the number 9 rendered in these documents,
it's rendered as IX for the Roman numeral 9.
So there's some mystery here in this letter,
and I turned to good old chat GPT in order to
get some help with it. And it turns out that
this is a really good letter for practicing one's
conjugations in medieval Catalan, because there's
a lot of uses of the verb venir to come and so
we're seeing it these conditional phrases like
if you would come or please come to the court
so we've got well let me see i'll just like list
them off here we've got I think those are the
three that appear here. So the way that this
letter starts is a typical initial phrase, Entes
havem, which means we have understood. So Violant
is starting out this letter by saying, hey, we've
gotten some information and here's what the information
is. Then... We have a person's name a little
bit further down the line Miguel de Noval's But
what comes right before that is the phrase per
relacio den and in the modern normalization of
Den there would be an apostrophe so D apostrophe
N so that would expand out to day and which is
of mister so what the first few words of this
letter are saying is we have understood by the
report of mr miguel de noval's and then following
the name is que which would translate to that And
then we have vos vendriez, so that you would
come. So Miguel de Noval has reported to Violant
that the addressee of this letter would come
to Barcelona. And then the rest of the letter
is just kind of ornamenting that by saying phrases
like oh if you if you knew that you that i wanted
you to come then you would definitely come so
what i'm doing is i'm letting you know nos certificam
i am informing you that i would be pleased if
you came to our presence here if you came to
the the court and and that's it so basically
what this boils down to is i heard from miguel
de noval's that if you knew that i wanted you
here you would come here and so i'm telling you
i want you here but the question is who and We
don't know. The probata does not give us any
clues. It simply is your typical probata. Dona
Regina mandauit mihi is the first line of the
probata. And then pere de basanta. Pere de Basant
is the scribe. We see a lot of letters in this
register that have been copied by pere de basant.
And then the probata p at the end. So there's
no clues here. And I honestly am really surprised
because one of the points of being able to record
these letters is that you can come back to them
and access their meaning. And so the idea that
they would let this one go without putting in
the addressee in the line below the last line
as often happens is, to me, hard to understand.
Maybe they were just in a hurry? I don't know
what to make of this. It doesn't really seem
like a situation where there would be some kind
of secrecy required, so... I don't know. I'm
just gonna have to hope that at some other point
I find another mention of Miguel de Novales.
I did go to chat GPT again to see if Miguel de
Novales appears in any of the secondary literature.
There is an article by a scholar named Guillermo
Lopez Juan. from just 2024 in which Miguel de
Novales is mentioned as a member of the oligarchy
in Valencia. So that's something and yeah I'll
just have to keep on looking around but I think
what's important here is the fun dancing tone
of this little note like why is it necessary
to have all this conditional phrasing to say
I summon you or who is Violant writing to that
she feels the need to couch her request for this
person's presence in this kind of language. It's
pretty interesting. So I'm really having a sense
here of building the plane as I'm flying it on
its initial voyage, because my understanding
of the nuance of medieval Catalan is really at
the beginning stages. This summer I'm taking
an intensive seminar in medieval Catalan, and
I hope to get from that a little bit more understanding
of some of the nuances like what I'm seeing in
this particular letter. And suffice it to say
that it's always an ongoing learning process.
You know, this is how history gets made. You
try to make progress on your understanding of
what happened in the past as you're overcoming
language barriers or other kinds of barriers
and understanding that will arise when you're
trying to imagine what was going on in such a
long time ago or even not so long ago. You can
have the assumptions and the perceptions that
ground you in the present day interrupting your
understanding of what happened in the past. a
little letter like this can bring that out in
some surprising ways and so what historians do
is they do their best and then later historians
will come and look over again a particular letter
or a particular interpretation and they'll say
hey actually I can refine this and that's how
real history gets made and it's actually like
a lot of fields of knowledge like can imagine
what I'm talking about in terms of scientific
experiments where someone does a scientific experiment,
they reach a certain conclusion, and then someone
else comes back later and challenges that with
maybe a larger sample size in their study, so
on and so forth. So knowledge building as a collaborative
process is key to how history gets made, and
it's key to understanding the value of expertise
overall. And that leads me to discussing a little
bit about AI. I thought this would be a good
episode for me to get into some of the guidelines
that I have in mind when I'm using AI, because
it's incredibly helpful, but you've got to be
very cautious. And so I'm going to explain a
little bit about my cautionary notes. First of
all, what you have been noticing if you're looking
at a lot of the AI chat transcripts is that I
have not done anything to limit the sycophantic
tone that AI is generally programmed to give
its users. So my go -to chat bot is ChatGPT,
and famously it is known for this kind of positive
reinforcement saying things like, ooh, you did
a good job on that, or having these weird emotional
responses like saying, ooh, this letter is so
very Joan, which is bizarre. Like I can't even
figure out why it wants to do that. But it's
part of this tone programming that the folks
at open AI think is going to make people more
excited to use chat GPT. I find it annoying and
in some cases very like grating like it's irritating
but You know, I keep it on and the reason I have
not done it you can change your settings to eliminate
that But I want to keep it on because I want
to be reminded that I'm dealing with this entity
that can sound authoritative and I don't want
to fall into the trap of believing everything
I hear so if I keep that level of positive feedback
sycophancy turned on, then I'm routinely reminded
that what I'm being presented with might sound
comprehensive when it's really not, and it might
sound authoritative when it is not justified
to be an authority on a particular topic. Now,
that said, I have found that in this project
in particular I have been saved by chat GPT in
terms of unlocking the meaning of the document
or being alerted to aspects of the document that
are really interesting to me that I wouldn't
have picked up on if I was just doing this on
my own without the. assistance of the AI chatbot,
including today's letter, my knowledge of medieval
Catalan grammar, or just, you know, even modern
Catalan grammar, isn't really good enough for
me to have really pulled out some of the grammatical
layers of meaning for this document. So even
if chat GPT is wrong in certain areas of its
interpretation, I'm still being alerted to that
there's something going on here that I could
look into more deeply. And then the other other
part of this is that I can see what chat GPT
is searching. So if I ask it to search for secondary
literature from scholarly sources, I can see
the websites that it's looking at and I can see
that it's going to publishers websites like Brill
or Cambridge University Press. Publishers that
I know are extremely high quality in the world
of academic publishing. So I'm able to monitor
what ChatGPT is doing in its searches. It absolutely
could have some blind spots and you know, the
whole copyright violation issue with the AI chatbots
and all of the scraping of data is a real ethical
issue. And I'm not trying to excuse that or gloss
over it. But there is a cost benefit situation
that I'm feeling here that I can apply. to the
ethical stance a little bit, that the gain in
the practice and the educational endeavor is
so great that it is worth engaging with the product
even with its substantial ethical flaws at this
time. So it's something that I am not dismissive
of in any way and I keep returning to and thinking
through and my monitoring to see what happens
in the industry and how certain products their
companies are more or less responsive to the
feedback they're getting about the ethical dimensions
of what they're doing. So that was my little
take on chat GPT. and using AI, there's more
to be said, but I wanted to address it just for
a little while, especially because this was a
pretty short letter, and there was a little bit
of time in today's episode to do that. Thanks
so much for listening to this episode of the
Historian's Notebook, Season 1, Molt Cara Companyona.
If you are leaving with more questions than you
arrived with, I've done my job. Remember, the
motto of the Historian's Notebook is dissatisfaction
guaranteed. Visit the website to see an image
of today's document. It's the little tiny one
at the very top of the folio. And also on the
webpage you'll find additional show notes. And
listen again tomorrow to hear about the next
day in the first year of the reign of King Joan
of Aragon and Queen Violant de Bar. In the
meantime, take care.