The work to revise the paper that I’m currently working on, which contrasts evidence for popular, er, expressions of ethnicity from personal names supplied by charters from early tenth-century León with those to which students are more used based on the late-ninth century chronicles of Asturias, has led me inexorably to actually having to get to grips with some of the voluminous work of Don Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz. I had in some sense been avoiding this: when I first began work on Spain it was very much in an area where his convictions (about depopulation and repopulation) were being thrown out by scholars such as (especially) Eduardo Manzano Moreno, and so it was possible to manage without digging into it very far. Also, and partly because of his own polemic style I guess, those refuting him were not above pointing out his rather, er, unfashionably 1930s-style political views, which also made him someone I didn’t want to have to deal with yet. But mainly it was the sheer volume of output that was offputting: observe that the bibliography I linked to above has 23 different monographs in it, and though probably half of them are reprints of papers and older material, multiply overlapping and making each other part-way redundant in a way that the music re-release industry would be proud of, the others aren’t. Various aspects of his thinking seem to reoccur in different versions through all these works, however, and I now realise that the breadth of citation from his work by his followers is at least partly down to those followers selecting the particular presentation of one of his theses which best suits their particular point.
This makes him much easier to cite and agree with than to refute. Pretty much anything you want him to have said is out there somewhere, in an arrogant and brash summary of the conclusions of some previous work which actually puts a very distinct spin on that work’s contents. Things that were established as strong possibilities he appears to have considered proven if left unchallenged (or not challenged well enough) for long enough, like a kind of historiographical version of the 30-Year Rule. So whatever you want him to have said, he probably did put into print at one point or another during his fifty-year exile from the documents on which he based his work.
When you come to want to refute it, however, you go back to the original studies on which the brash assertions rely, and run into trouble. There, the conclusions are advanced more carefully, with a great deal of phrases like “muy probable”, “sin embargo” and “no es probada”. But the setting out of evidence behind them is painstaking to the point of pedantry, and almost entirely inarguable. His view, except in the case of assertions about racial characteristics perhaps, is always supported, and all you can do is suggest variant interpretations. Worse, you find that the points you wanted to make against his statements were actually anticipated and given a nod of consideration in this work, so that if you want to be fair in attribution you now have to cite Don Claudio in detail to support your own contentions that argue against him in general.
I am therefore learning respect for the man and his work, which was approximately the last thing I anticipated when I picked it up. More fool me perhaps: one doesn’t become an institution of a nation’s learning without knowing a thing or two. At the same time, it’s very difficult to get anything past him, and he’s been dead twenty-three years and venerably repetitive for many previous. Apart from the forty-year exile there must be worse careers to have had.
22 February 2010 at 13:23
[...] I have written here before about the particular difficulty presented to the non-Spaniard trying to get a grip on the historiography of early medieval Spain by the existence of the voluminous œuvre of Professor Don Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz. But I’m going to do so again. Let me just remind you: he was from early on a promising analyst of early medieval texts, especially charters which hardly anyone was using at that time; but that time was immediately before the Spanish Civil War, in which Dr Sánchez-Albornoz found himself on the wrong side. Emigrating therefore to Argentina, he worked for another forty-odd years without sight of the original texts and still managed to found a major journal (Cuadernos de Historia de España) and publish a huge number of articles and books, which more or less set a mould for the Spanish historiography of the Middle Ages by emphasising what it was that was special about Spain, and Spanish feudalism in particular.1 Unfortunately he did all this with an absolute poison pen for his opponents, a tame journal in which to publish his attacks, and a low tolerance for disagreement, as well as a strong tendency to migrate his theories from tentative suggestions well hedged with qualifications through ‘accepted theories’ to ‘things that I have proven’ the longer they remained unopposed. Some time towards the end of this, he became President of the Republic in Exile, in which capacity he outlived his hated Franco (than whom, for many, he was no less nationalist or objectionable) and eventually returned to Spain in 1983, a few years before his eventual death. He received the first parts of a six-volume Festschrift on his ninetieth birthday and there have been several other commemorative volumes since then.2 His legacy looms large, and it is prickly. [...]
3 May 2010 at 11:26
[...] Vigil themselves as the authorities they became, Ramón Menéndez Pidal and (of course) Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz all proceeded directly from the sources for the most part and where they mentioned other historians [...]