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Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages by Jesús R. Velasco

2022; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rhm.2022.0012

1944-6446

Manuela Bragagnolo,

Classical Studies and Legal History

Reviewed by: Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages by Jesús R. Velasco Manuela Bragagnolo KEYWORDS Siete Partidas, Medieval Codification Techniques, Legal Writing, Legal Materiality, Law and Emotions jesús r. Velasco. Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages. U of Pennsylvania P, 2020, 228 pp. The material turn in the social sciences has recently drawn new attention to the materiality of law. Although with a certain delay compared with other disciplines, several studies, in the last years, have been dedicated to legal materiality, investigating for instance the role of "paperwork" in the lawmaking process (Latour), the intertwining between the law and the technology of writing (Vismann), the connections between print media and legal knowledge (Zhang), as well as the close link between form and content in early modern legal books, emphasizing the importance of looking at legal history as a history of written legal communication (Hespanha). Additionally, an interesting line of scholarship is now exploring historically the interactions between law and emotions (Rozenblatt; Kounine and Vidor). Analyzing medieval codification practices, Jesús R. Velasco's study offers an innovative and convincing perspective that can be seen to intertwine the materiality of law and the attention to law and emotions in a new way. Velasco's work is dedicated to the most important Castilian medieval normative corpus, Siete Partidas by Alfonso X. Promulgated only in the fourteenth century, the Partidas were composed during Alfonso's kingdom. The question of the exact dates of the composition is still debated. Even though a certain consensus has been reached about the dates (between June 1256 and August 1265), Velasco's original research challenges the traditional interpretation by anticipating the legislative impulse to 1254 (12). By studying Alfonso as a legislator, the author clearly refers to his workshop, composed by "compilers, translators, textual specialists, scientists and other intellectuals and scholars," all working together "to build the intellectual, and scholarly immensity of the Alfonsine Era" (10). But he also underlines the crucial role of Alfonso in the textuality of the code itself: each of the Siete Partidas begins with a letter of the king's name, which is the acronym that gives rise to the code. Working on the textuality and materiality of the Partidas, Velasco draws new attention to the technology of writing as a key element for understanding the "methods, decisions, and theoretical perspectives that underpin the creation and writing of an all-encompassing [medieval] legal code" (1). Here the careful and conscious use of emotions, feelings, and affects by the medieval legislator, all of which Velasco analyzes in detail, plays a fundamental role in the legislation techniques. Even though constantly in dialogue with the more traditional questions and methods used by legal historians, especially in the past, the author takes a cultural-historical approach, more interested in reading "the production of law [End Page 223] not as a way to address the continuity and self-replication of the discipline but rather as a cultural project with political consequences" (24). The material history and the textuality of the Partidas are conceived as means of legal epistemology. Therefore, the book provides an attentive reading of those Partidas in which the methods and legislation strategies are clearly displayed. In his work, Velasco mainly refers to the 1555 "imperial" edition by Gregorio López (15), which includes the glosses and commentaries that testify to a centuries-long tradition of legal discussion throughout the Iberian empire. But he also takes into account the manuscript tradition. At the core of Velasco's study are Alfonso's means of regulating legal writing at both the normative and documentary levels. Legal writing is addressed in the third Partida, dedicated to the administration of justice, procedural law, and the regulation of documents and writings of all types. In describing Alfonso's regulation of legal writing, Velasco borrows an expression used by medieval theologians and lawyers, introduced in the prologue 18 of the third Partida: "dead voice," (vox mortua), as opposed to living voice, oral witnessing. In chapter one, the study of "dead voice" lets the author analyze the techniques and theories of codifications of the Partidas and then access larger issues in...