Hello. In The Crown of Aragon, 639 years ago,
it was February 20th, 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 of Aragon and
Queen Violant de Bar. Let's begin today's document.
We find today's document in the same register
as yesterday. It's one attributed to Joan. It's
actually on the same folio that we were looking
at yesterday. The letter, or I should say document,
right below the one for the safe conduct of Jacob
de Bar. the troubadour. Below that document the
next one has a really gorgeous heading. I don't
know what inspired the scribe to just like go
all out with this header. It is in thick ink
and it's just got larger letters than usual and
I think it's just a example of how really gorgeous
this handwriting can be. And it's in Latin, the
heading, but the document itself is in Catalan.
The heading is That is something that I can easily
understand. It's for some merchants of Perpignan.
So this document is issued by Joan. It's for
a group of merchants, so this is definitely plural.
The endings of each of the words in that phrase
indicate that it's plural. But then... Really,
there's only one person mentioned maybe the captain
of the ship I'm not sure because sometimes the
person who was getting documentation for a Navigational
adventure a merchant shipment was not necessarily
the captain but could be the financier of the
of the journey the trade journey. So the person
that's named in this letter is Guillem Ramon.
Guillem Ramon of Perpignan. And then the letter
itself mentions that there's other merchants
involved, but they're just referred to as omens
mercaderens, or uh something can't quite figure
out the ending of the mercader part of that phrase
but you know the merchant men the the merchants
organizers or the merchants the people who themselves
are are the sailors possibly are included here
i i would actually lean towards thinking that
the intention here is for the leadership the
the people who were in that captain role or otherwise
the those responsible for for the overall success
of this voyage the the date of course is February
20th and I mention that again because it was
just a couple days ago that we looked at a letter
from Violant to her father and then another
similar one to her brother in which Violant
uses the word malaltia de febre well the phrase
a illness of fever and then very anxiously, I
think, tells her father and brother to not believe
any information that they receive through the
rumor mill that Joan is in ill health. She
says that he's recovered, that all the doctors
say that he has left peril. that he's no longer
in this deaths door kind of state. I mention
all this because the letter that we're looking
at today and again gosh I use the word I'm so
used to using the word letter but it's it's not
really a letter it's more of a of a document
because Joan is not like writing to Guillaume
Ramon. as like a correspondent, he's issuing
him a government document. So this government
document is basically just saying that they're
going to have some kind of business associated
with France or or some kind of interaction with
French goods or interactions with with French
members of their crew and that they need to make
sure to protect all of the French things that
they have just as, you know, vigorously as they
would protect the stuff that's their own. I'm
not quite sure why this is necessary to specify.
My feeling is that if you're a Captain on a merchant
vessel that if you get into trouble you're gonna
try to save all the goods But maybe if you were
encountered by pirates or something you might
have in mind a kind of hierarchy for what you
would hand over to them as a ransom or as kind
of a toll to kind of fulfill the extortionary
situation there and you might say well the stuff
from france it's uh of less importance so all
right that's the content of the letter but remember
i brought up the situation of joan's illness
and his recovery that violant had just mentioned
two days before why am i doing that It's because
there is this line at the end of the letter that
I was just really surprised to read. I'll read
it out in the Catalan and then I'll translate
it as best I can into English. Here's the Catalan.
It's the last line of the letter before the dating
clause. Oh gosh, I already am running into trouble
here. Oh yeah, okay, sorry. Okay, let me start
again. And then, let's see. Did you hear the
word accident in there? Yeah. So I was completely
surprised to see this line mentioning misfortune
in the first person, first person plural. What
this line translates to, roughly, is that...
Okay, I'll just kind of say it. you have this
written letter as if I had signed it with my
own hand because of a misfortune to my person
I did not sign it or it does not have my signature.
This sentence just has so much meaning to unpack.
It has put the lens of disability studies firmly
into our process here because Joan is not able
to sign the document himself. I have on my agenda
for reading up on the context of this whole situation
of Joan's illness and sickliness. I have on
my agenda to get way more familiar with disability
studies and the effect of disability studies
on historical methodology, the way that academic
historians approach working with evidence from
the past that has been impacted by the insights
of disability studies. And I haven't gotten as
far into understanding disability studies as
I would like. And so that was one of my main
missions for this year. As I'm looking at these
documents, I wanted to, as I went through this
year, get more familiar with disability studies.
I currently have a surface level understanding
of the critique of disability studies. The scholarship
on disability studies really got going over the
last 40 years. There's certainly been critiques
of the way that there are assumptions of able
bodiedness in our society and in the histories
that we write that were published and well known
way earlier than the last 40 years. But in terms
of an academic discipline, disability studies
really became established as one of the core
methodologies in historical and in the work of
history in the historical discipline really starting
in the 1980s and the 1990s and the major approach
of disability studies is that disability is socially
constructed now that means that what counts as
a disability What counts as somebody having some
kind of disability is not determined in the way
that we might stereotypically think of it as
having something that's happened to your body
that makes it so you can't do things. That is
a very simplistic way of thinking about disability
and it puts the entire character of disability
on an individual whose body is affected by something.
The insight of disability studies is to really
challenge that and to observe that what's going
on among the group of human beings in a society
is producing this status of disability. And my
favorite analogy that I have heard about this
is about eyesight. So before corrective lenses,
somebody whose eyesight was not at 20 -20 vision
or maybe far away from 20 -20 vision, they would
have absolutely been disabled. They wouldn't
have been able to function in society with the
same ease as somebody who had near 20 -20 vision.
And so they would have counted as disabled, absolutely,
because their functioning in the surrounding
society would have been limited. With corrective
lenses, though, eyesight became actually very,
very different so that you can wear glasses and
then later contact lenses and function in society
as if you were someone with 20 -20 vision. Now,
of course, that doesn't include every single
person whose eyesight is not 20 -20, but it really
changed the way that people thought about able
-bodiedness when it came to eyesight. And today,
somebody who wears glasses is not considered
disabled. Whereas in the time that we're talking
about with the documents in this podcast this
season, absolutely somebody who would require
a strong prescription for corrective lenses in
our time, they would have been severely limited
in their activities and they would have been
in a category of not able bodied. So what's happening
in the surrounding society and the technology
that it uses and the activities that it deems
fundamental to moving around in that society?
That's what sets the parameters. That's what
sets the boundaries of disability versus able
bodiedness. So when historians take that insight
and apply it to their study of the past, certain
things become more noteworthy. So in this document,
we're going to read against the grain because
the document itself is not about ability or disability.
The document is about granting some authorizations
to this the group of merchants and telling them
to be careful about the stuff from France. That's
what this document is about. We're going to actually
read against the grain of this document and focus
in on this last sentence about Joan not being
able to sign the document himself. Look at how
when you have a person placed in a position of
such importance in the society. The apparatus
that gets invoked to overcome or overlook their
disability and the way that it is legitimated.
So it's operating at a couple of different levels.
First of all, He has scribes. Other people regularly
are writing for him. That is not typical of the
literate classes, even among the elite. Most
of the elite who could read and write, they would
be writing themselves in their own hand. It was
only the super elite who regularly had scribes
writing for them. So, in this situation, we have
Joan's disability, in a sense, covered up.
Because look at all the documents that we have
been reviewing that we were attributing to Joan.
Well, for how long has he not been able to write
himself physically? Has it been since he started
out his journey to Barcelona from Girona? Unlike
what January 3rd? Has he not been able to write?
Has his writing hand or arm been immobile this
whole time? And look at how the apparatus of
the state. has moved to obscure that and instead
present Joanne as fully abled and how all of
our assumptions would have led us to continue
thinking of Joan as able -bodied when it came
to his duty to sign documents until we see this
line. No one has written about Joan using the
lens in their writing, their historical writing
about him, using the lens of disability studies,
and I'm really excited to bring that into the
historiography. So why did Joan feel that he
had to have this line added now to this letter?
Is it because the monarch's actual signature
was so customary for documents like these? Which
would be presumably taken overseas and shown
to people far and wide? Was it an expectation
to be able to see a recognizable and legitimate
looking signature from the king? Was that something
that was so customary that its absence required
explanation as we see here? I guess? I mean,
it seems to me rather strange that all the other
documents that we've seen didn't require this.
But, you know, this is the first document that
really seems to be intended to be carried a vast
distance, like more vast than to France, like
the document above. And it's also involved in
this very international context of the trade
shipping routes and all of the kinds of contexts
and situations that one would encounter as they're
going on a boat along the Mediterranean. And
I say along the Mediterranean because to use
the word across as a misnomer, the ships were
not going as the crow flies from one port to
another in the Mediterranean. If you wanted to
go to the Levant you would you would mostly be
hugging the coastline because it was safer than
going out into the middle of the open sea. So
but that That then brings you into contact with
just all these other vessels and all these encounters.
So all of these encounters, maybe that's what
would require the monarch's signature versus
the journey of Jacob de Bar the troubadour going
over land to wherever he's going in France. I
don't I just don't know. But that's my guess.
And the addition of this line has really made
it much more urgent for me to get up to speed
with disability studies. So I'm just going to
mention two works of edited essays that I think
are going to be very foundational for understanding
the role of disability studies in historical
methodology right now. The first is a collection
by Recunbir, Kudlick, and Nielsen. It's the
Oxford Handbook of Disability History. And then
the other one that I'm going to be looking at
is Barclay and Hunt-Kennedy as editors. The title
is Cripping the Archive, Disability, History,
and Power. So I'm going to be looking at those
collections starting this week, and I'm going
to be really trying to incorporate those insights
much much more thoroughly than I have done so
far. I've alluded to some of this when I've talked
about Joan's illness, but it's time to make
this really central. I just am really, wow. Okay,
one last thing. We're really over time here,
but one last thing to mention is that there's
some reason that a lot of this letter has been
duplicated in what's further down on this same
folio and i can't honestly can't quite figure
out why it was necessary to write this a second
time and let me just see yeah i can't i just
it doesn't have a separate addressee listed at
the bottom of the letter which is actually on
the next folio 32r so i am perplexed by the addition
of another round of this same letter that by
the way also includes the same line at the end
about Joan not being able to sign the letter
because of an accident to his person uh misfortune
to his person okay so really just an awesome
discovery one of the most important discoveries
in the podcast so far I think is discussed today
and I am really kind of have my attention focused
on whether we have other references to Joan's
body coming up in other documents but I just
I'm still just feeling really... I... yeah, I'm
just still really surprised that this was added
into this letter. Ah, this document. Well, he
refers it to the letter. That's one of the reasons
I keep doing that. He says, a questa letra. Okay,
thanks for listening to this episode of the Historian's
Notebook, season one, Molt Cara Companyona. If
you are leaving, with more questions than you
arrived with, I have done my job, because remember,
the motto of the Historian's Notebook is dissatisfaction
guaranteed. Visit the website to see an image
of today's document, additional show notes, and
a bunch of bibliographic citations for foundational
and recent works in disability history. 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.