The Code of Cuenca: Municipal Law on the Twelfth-Century Castilian Frontier (review)

Reviews 225 Parergon 20.2 (2003) essays. The role of female poets and the female lyric persona in delineating and extending genres is a recurring theme, as is the importance of medieval rhetorical and grammatical treatises. The centrality of the musical component in interpreting lyric is acknowledged. My only complaint with this stimulating book is the consistent misspelling of Mary Magdalene throughout Huot’s article. Mary Scrafton Adelaide, South Australia Powers, James F., The Code of Cuenca: Municipal Law on the Twelfth-Century Castilian Frontier, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000; cloth, pp. vii, 245; RRP US$49.95, £37.00; ISBN 0812235452. Urban historians have traditionally focussed their studies on the more familiar areas of Europe, in Northern Italy, England and France. James F. Powers has long been a leader among those seeking to broaden this focus to include Iberian communities. Toward the end of the twelfth century, King Alfonso VIII of Castile (1158-1214) granted a municipal law code, the Forum Conche, to the frontier town of Cuenca. Although the Forum Conche is of unusual length and offers a wealth of detail concerning urban life on the Spanish frontier, until recently it has been little known beyond the confines of specialist Hispanic studies. With The Code of Cuenca Powers has produced a welcome English translation of a law code that provides an important insight into the municipal administration of the Castilian borderland communities. The statutes contained in the Forum Conche are remarkable for their meticulous scope. They address mundane disputes arising from communal living as carefully as they do the most heinous capital crimes. In one section, for example, the fine for refusing to maintain a sanitary latrine is fixed at a few coins per day until the situation is rectified. More serious crimes might attract heavier fines, mutilation, exile or even execution. The harshest penalties were exacted from conspirators found plotting against the king. Not only the culprits, but also members of their families, were burned at the stake, while their dwelling was razed to the ground ‘so that in the territory there should not be walls that have heard so great a crime.’ The application of these laws remained very much in the hands of the citizens, with locally-elected officials being responsible for the maintenance of order and the provision of justice in times of peace and war. The hand of royal authority rested lightly on the town. The king’s officials played 226 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) only a peripheral role in the day-to-day running of the community; the king himself provided an avenue of appeal only in certain, carefully restricted circumstances. While municipal administration is the focus of the Forum Conche, the code also paints a vivid picture of the heady mix of opportunity and social flexibility to be found on the Castilian frontier. During the twelfth century the code of Cuenca fostered a lively economic life, with rules carefully regulating the affairs of artisans and merchants, along with agricultural production in the region. Land was always available for new settlers and a large section of the code specifies the means by which enterprising newcomers might gain possession of properties around the town. The fluid demographic situation on the frontier also created an ethnically mixed population, substantial groups of Jews and Muslims continuing to live in the town under Christian rule. The code reveals a complex pattern of tolerance and segregation governing these minority groups, in which their basic rights were assured even as their interaction with Christian neighbours was subject to numerous restrictions. Similarly, the realities of frontier life created opportunities for the women of Cuenca, even as it imposed limitations upon them. The code guaranteed women important legal rights and a high level of economic independence. Such advantages were, however, predicated on a role as mother and wife in a frontier family; to flout these conventions was to invite severe, even fatal, penalties. The citizens of Cuenca enjoyed such legal privileges primarily because life on the frontier could also be precarious. The Forum Conche provides ample evidence of the endemic violence that blighted life in the town. Careful delineation of the penalties for various crimes involving assault and...