Project Details
Projekt
The Nature of the Office. Analyzing the habitus, self- and body-concepts of corregidores of the Spanish Monarchy (16th-17th century)
Applicant
Professor Dr. Arndt Brendecke
Subject Area
Early Modern History
Term
from 2013 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 228265259
The project analyses the behavior of the corregidores, representatives of the Spanish king who performed judicial and executive functions in major cities of the Spanish monarchy. Taking metaphors of contemporary political anthropology as a first clue, the project's basic assumption is that this behavior was portrayed as 'natural' and had to correspond to the 'nature' of the office (naturaleza del oficio) in accord with the assumption an essential correspondence of person and office. In this manner the officer was able to emphasize both his own aptitude for the office and his abstinence from temptations to abuse it (by passions, interests, partiality or corruption). This reference to a natural aptitude can be conceptualized by means of the concept of the 'Second Nature', which allows us to assume a Habitus of the corregidor, which accordingly constitutes a central subject of our investigation. This enables us to reconstruct the history of the public officer on the basis of early modern political anthropology and with a special emphasis on the history of the body and on gender history, instead of following the master narrative of a supposed genesis of a modern ethos of the public officer. The project profits particularly from the fact that the corregidor was not only a crucial figure in representing and imposing royal power. He was also the one official of the monarchy who was most often subjected to regular control procedures (juicios de residencia). Unlike other royal control mechanisms (visitas, informaciones, pesquisas), the juicios de residencia's distinctive trait was their periodicity. At the same time, the urban population was regularly invited to report on and testify against possible misconduct by the public officers. Consequently, it is possible to reconstruct a vivid picture of the behavior of the corregidores in the city and the office, as well as the limits that the population's tolerance fixed on the officials' scope of action. In the first phase, we have discovered an additional set of sources that will prove especially fruitful for our research, since these sources contain reports by the corregidores themselves about their personal and official conduct. These documents will be subjected to a thorough analysis in the second phase of the project, thus complementing the external view by the Crown and the urban population with the officials' tactical self-portrayal. This is particularly relevant since it is in these documents that the conflicts and ambiguities between the person and its second nature as a public officer are not only displayed, but also justified, contextualized and explained. Additionally, gender and body-historical aspect of the corregidores' official conduct become much more clearly discernible through these egodocuments than they were in the first phase of the project.
DFG Programme
Research Units
