El renacimiento hospitalario en la Península Ibérica: Una propuesta desde la cultura escrita (1374-1549)

Abstract

This doctoral thesis aims to analyze the hospital transformations that took place in the Iberian kingdoms from the last decades of the fourteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century. It has been designed to be a comparative and cross-border essay, being aware that most previous efforts have been exercises of local or regional history. To achieve this goal, different hospitals and localities both from the kingdom of Aragon and the crown of Castile have been studied through documents from various Spanish archives. The treatment and systematization of the information, as well as the presentation of the results, have benefited from the use of Digital Humanities, having developed the website Rethos (Retia Hospitalium), an online platform with historical and patrimonial information for the study of medieval and modern hospitals that has a database and a cartographic viewer. It is hypothesized that writing was the main element that transformed late medieval and early modern hospitals. Generally, emphasis has been placed on administrative documentation. However, this doctoral thesis proposal has focused on writings, in their multiple forms, productions, preservations, supports and contexts. Thus, attention should be paid to accounting, religious books and monumental inscriptions. With all this in mind, this essay is structured around three blocks. The first block consists of an exercise of conceptual critique that defines and characterizes the terms «hospital network(s)», «hospital reform(s)» and «hospital models» in their application to the territories of the Iberian Peninsula. The theoretical analysis is accompanied by different case studies focusing on the kingdom of Aragon, the seigniorial state of the Fernández de Velasco family in the north of Castille, and the transformations undertaken by the nobility and high ecclesiastical hierarchy in Toledo and Osuna (Seville). The second block deals with the multiple scriptural universes that flooded hospital spaces: information in family archives, écritures grises that established theory and practice, silenced writings of health professionals, practices of documentation conservation, religious books and their community reading, the installation of libraries, and monumental inscriptions petrified on the facades of buildings. The third block argues that the previously described transformations were reflected in the social, economic and sanitary spheres, with the hospital gradually moving away from its domus form. Both in rural and urban localities in Aragon and in the main centers of the Fernández de Velasco family in Castile, it is possible to identify a shift from hospitals with domestic economies to hospitals embedded in market economies that functioned as charitable enterprises. From a sociological point of view, it is observed, on the one hand, the creation of complex and hierarchical work teams and, on the other hand, the consolidation of the difference between the true and the false poor, being the former aided and the latter repressed. Finally, hospital theory allows tracing the progressive medicalization of these institutions from the beginning of the 14th century in an effort to seek health and cure illness. The conclusion, in addition to synthesizing all these ideas, defines a new heuristic concept coined in this doctoral thesis: «hospital renaissance». I define it as the combined study of the slow and progressive transformations that occurred between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries not only in the «hospital networks» and «hospital reforms» –quantitative and qualitative changes in hospital systems, respectively– but also in the dissemination of «hospital models» –a phenomenon that is a basic characteristic of the reforms and a type of connection of the nodes in hospital networks. «Renaissance», but in lower case, because, in reality, governments and urban and rural elites did not invent a new institution. On the contrary, they took one that already existed, the hospital, and endowed it with increasingly sophisticated technology: writing. I propose «hospital renaissance» in opposition to terms used by historiography, which I consider ineffective, such as «medieval hospital», «medieval hospital in transition», «renaissance hospital», «modern hospital», etc. In short, it is an effort to overcome generalized local history and to advocate for a global and comparative history.