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Spain  Labor  Ruth MacKay Artisanal guilds were a crucial part of the civic landscape in early modern Spain, though they were less powerful than in other parts of Europe and had less direct political power in Castile than in Catalonia. Madrid probably had over one hundred guilds in theearly seventeenth century, and Seville had as manyas eighty.They included crafts involving wood, leather, metals, decorative arts, food, and clothing, along with vendors and shopkeepers. Guilds were established to provide protection and community, but they also made it possible for poor artisans to conduct themselves as citizens of a republic. Guild ordinances functioned as law, and artisans , who often were literate, frequently defended that law in the courts. Most members were taxpayers, and, at least in Madrid, were often taxed, whether for cash or soldiers, as guild members, not as mere individuals. But even as individuals, shoemakers, blacksmiths, and tanners spoke as members of a body politic. The Spanish word for taxpayer is contribuyente; artisans took that literally. Artisans sometimes appear to have spent as much time in courts of law or protesting to municipal councils as they did in their workshops. That was one of the reasons eighteenth-­ century reformers would adduce for abolishing guilds. But though artisans might have been unreliable narrators insofar as the utility of their ordinances went, always claiming they were essential for the common good, their arguments in fact had substantial meaning and some merit. In fighting to keep things the way they were—or, conversely, to introduce novedades—guilds and their members were not displaying immunity to changing fashions or emerging science, as was often alleged, but rather were enacting an understanding of their community’s history. Laborers, with or without a guild, believed that they contributed by paying taxes, fighting wars, clothing the poor, supplying necessary utensils, and ensuring that standards and memory perdured. Pride in one’s town or village was often linked to what was made there. When Philip II ordered surveys of Castile in 1575 and 1578, people were asked to identify “things that are made or worked there that are better than in other places.” The very question suggests a linkage between production and small-­ town patriotism. Most of the towns were so poor that by the time of the survey they could say only that people there “lived by their labors” (viven de sus trabajos). But people came from miles around to buy drills in Getafe made by a certain Muñoz; Talavera naturally boasted of its ceramics; and Toboso, the home of Don Quixote, replied: “What this town makes and has always made better than any other place in Spain are earthenware vats for wine, oil, and anything elseone might want to store in them, and there is great skill and science in the said town in the making of them.” But, the town official added, “this craft is declining because of the lack of firewood for baking the vats.”1 Occupation and the labor it involved bestowed rights, identity, and place. It also gave an individual a sort of virtue or honor, more or less the same thing. “Men were judged by how well they performed in their callings,” Scott Taylor has written, even if those callings were common ones and even if one was poor compared to one’s neighbors.2 Good artisans had a gift and knew it, and they knew their gift was useful. In early modern Spain there was no shame in working . The mechanical activity was not vile, no matter how many treatises considered that equation. On the contrary, nothing was more sinful than ocio (sloth), regarded as a betrayal of a man’s duty toward his family and his community . The pícaro may have been a fixture in Golden Age drama, but he was not looked kindly upon in real life; nor would disdain for manual labor have been comprehensible to communities intent upon being good subjects of their king and good providers for their neighbors. Laborers may have had honor of a sort, but it is also true that many were very poor.Wives and children worked alongside their men, rural laborers had workshops in theoff season, and urban artisans returned to villages to help out with the harvest. Life might be easier in America. There, relatives promised, they could work for themselves instead of for somebody else; they could hire assistants. In 1576 Alonso Morales, now living in Puebla, Mexico, wrote to his cousin back home: “We...

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