Digging through the Archives Together: Collaborative Research in Late Medieval Gender and Jewish History

"Feminism is an inherently plural noun, for feminist approaches are always diverse and multiple."¹

Late in the fourteenth century, in the city of Girona, located in northeastern Spain, a contract was drawn up on behalf of Blanca de Banyoles, a recently married woman who had converted from Judaism to Christianity the year before.² The document included a copy of a royal letter, issued by King Joan of the Crown of Aragon, confirming Blanca's grant of the wardship of her young son Miquel and usufruct from her deceased husband's estate. Blanca's position as guardian had been challenged by her first husband's Jewish family, who argued that, as she had remarried, Blanca should lose control of Miquel and the considerable assets he had inherited from his father. Blanca appealed to the king who confirmed the wishes of her deceased husband's testament, which had named her as guardian and given her the usufruct from his property whether or not she remarried.³

The document containing these details is located in the Arxiu Historic de Girona, bound into a notarial register which was one of several extant by the notary Francesc de Cantallops. It is part of the more than one hundred notarial records, almost a dozen royal letters, and a handful of municipal documents we have uncovered in various local and royal archives in Girona and Barcelona that involve Blanca de Banyoles's activities in the last decade of the fourteenth century. Together these documents tell the story of a woman who moved from marriage to motherhood to widowhood to remarriage, who managed the sizeable assets of her infant son with pragmatism and shrewdness, who faced challenges from familial and business groups, all the while negotiating the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity.

Blanca is just one of the many women whom we have tracked through the notarial records of Girona in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries as part of a collaborative project on Jewish women and conversas in late medieval Catalonia. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, this project makes extensive use of the rich notarial and municipal archives of Girona, while also digging into the royal letters of this period, located in the Arxiu de Corona de Aragon in Barcelona. A key factor in the success of this project has been its collaborative nature: that two scholars are working together to research and write about this material, using a methodology that is still unusual in the discipline of history. In this article, we would like to propose collaborative research as a methodology for the study of medieval and early modern women's and gender history. We argue that it can open up new avenues of research and expand the discipline in new directions. Working collaboratively has allowed us not only to bring different perspectives to our research and tackle topics neither of us would have approached alone, but it has also permitted us to cover a wider and deeper range of documentation. As collaborators we can move between the distinct paleographic and diplomatic structures of various archives, as well as the different historiographic fields that our project encompasses. A Jewish woman who converted to Christianity in a transformative period in medieval Spanish history, Blanca held many identities: she was a daughter, wife, mother, and widow; Jew and Christian (conversa); and was subject to royal, municipal, and religious authorities. Being able to combine expertise in Christian and Jewish history, feminist scholarship, gender history, and social history, our collaboration has allowed us to tell a complex story like that of Blanca de Banyoles with a more intersectional understanding of Blanca and the Jewish and conversa women of her community and to offer a more nuanced examination of the choices that women in premodern Europe made around family, economic activities, marriage, and religion.

Defining Collaborative Research

We should start by defining what we mean by "collaborative research." Distinguishing between collaborative research and co-writing is often difficult since scholarly studies on such activities often...