At the Palace, Among the Prince’s Possessions: Material Culture and Power at the Dawn of the Early Modern Period
Abstract
This lecture aims to bring us closer to the material and cultural life of princes in the mid-15th century. We will situate ourselves in the city of Barcelona, within the walls of the royal palace. We will attempt to walk through its chambers as far as the documentary sources allow, pausing to examine the everyday, luxurious, and decorative objects that appear in those spaces, with the intention of reconstructing, as far as possible, the material reality that shaped the princeps’ daily life. All this will be done through the information provided by post mortem inventories — documents of extraordinary richness — especially the inventories of Charles of Aragon and Navarre (1461), Constable Peter of Portugal (1464), and John II of Aragon (1479). Leafing through these inventories allows us to reconstruct part of the material world that made up the palatial settings, examining books, jewels, weapons, garments, relics, and tapestries — bringing us a little closer to the everyday reality of palace life, the life of princes.
About the Speaker
Vera-Cruz Miranda Menacho holds a PhD in History from the University of Barcelona (2012). She was a predoctoral fellow at the CSIC (Milà i Fontanals Institution) and has been a lecturer in Medieval History at the Rey Juan Carlos University since 2020.
She began her research in the archives of the Monastery of Pedralbes in the city of Barcelona, focusing on certain economic aspects of the monastery in the 15th century. Later, she centered her doctoral research on the figure of Charles of Aragon and Navarre, Prince of Viana (1421–1461), focusing her studies on his time within the Crown of Aragon and examining his political career in that context, as well as the courtly and cultural environment that surrounded him. The results were presented in her doctoral dissertation and in the monograph El príncipe de Viana y su tiempo, published by Sílex in 2017.
She has also explored various aspects related to the figure of the Prince of Viana, delving into issues of cultural and courtly history, such as forms of representation of power and the reception of moral values within late medieval political culture, through the image of the humanist prince. These studies have been published in several academic articles and collective works.
In 2023, she coordinated a volume dedicated to the image of the prince, approached from more innovative perspectives aimed at studying forms of power construction, titled The Image of the Prince between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: New Approaches, thus continuing her research in political and cultural history.