Family and Community in Early Modern Spain: The Citizens of Granada, 1570-1739 (review)

Since its emergence in the early 1960s, the history of the family has developed into both a concrete object of study and a flexible instrument for exploring social, economic, cultural, and political change. Casey takes up both these approaches in his new study of the Andalusian city of Granada. Casey offers new insight into the shifting dynamics of power and prestige in early modern Spain through an examination of the strategies and solidarities that bound together the Granadino family and an exploration of its relationships with the local and national communities.

The last outpost of Iberian Islam, Granada underwent a thorough transformation during the decades after its conquest by Catholic Castile in 1492. Casey's examination of the changes within and around the Granadino family focuses not on the decades of greatest flux but on the long seventeenth century, a period in which Granada's new institutions and immigrant populations consolidated their place within local society. The title is slightly misleading—"citizens" refers not to Granada's vecinos, or community members, but to its ciudadanos, its governing elites and community leaders. Thus, while Casey occasionally explores the structures and values that informed the family life of humbler Granadinos, these discussions tend to be centered upon their relations with their more powerful neighbors.

In twelve chapters chronicling Granada's leading families' economic activities, inheritance and marriage practices, domestic spaces, education, kinship, and charity, Casey explores early modern Granada's culture of honor, its formal institutions and informal interpersonal networks, and the relationship between public and private and society and self. Seventeenth-century Granada offers a particularly interesting venue for examining such thorny questions, since, as a city of immigrants, its elite was "mobile" and flexible enough to integrate newcomers (120). What bonded together this new, heterogeneous elite, he finds, was memory and the cult of lineage and ancestry, which tended to overshadow nuclear families and personal identities. Casey's conclusions have implications for thinking about the early modern self, although he might have developed this line further. He also finds that, even as local patricians increasingly looked to the Crown as a source of honor, power for individual Granadinos and for their families within Granada and at court was still closely tied to their standing within the local, civic community and to the informal bonds of personal obligation in patronage, friendship, and kinship that informed the workings of formal governing institutions. Even though a common culture of honor and chivalry helped to bond Granada's local elites to their fellows in Madrid, even in an age of absolutism the values and loyalties of the small-scale community prevailed.

Much of Casey's reconstruction of the values of Granada's oligarchs rests upon prosopographies of some of the city's leading kin groups. Painstakingly pieced together from documents in the secular and ecclesiastical archives of Granada and Madrid (and accompanied by eight detailed genealogical charts), these family histories reveal much about the activities and attitudes of elite Granadinos. Casey contextualizes individual examples from the archives within an extensive secondary literature, and he weaves literary and artistic sources into the thick array of wills and lawsuits, contracts, and petitions. The effects are sometimes impressionistic rather than empirical, but the overall result is a rich and sympathetic portrait of a provincial elite in an age of change composed in a fluid and readable style.