Bulletin of the Comediantes

ON 23 APRIL 1978, busloads of leftists and activists and ordinary fairgoers from throughout Castile converged upon a large field outside the town of Villalar to memorialize an army of Castilian commoners that implausibly rose up against the monarchy in 1520 and a year later was crushed in the very expanse where we were gathered. Some two hundred thousand people waved Republican flags and flags of all the regions of Spain after forty years of prohibition, and they chanted "Castilla, entera, se siente comunera." They wore and traded pins with flags, they delivered endless speeches, played instruments and roasted sausages and danced and sang and ate and drank, and it went on all day. I was young and I had never heard of the comuneros. But I will never forget that day, when Juan Padilla rose from the dead and spoke to vast crowds of people still celebrating the demise of the Franco dictatorship.

Miguel Martínez has written a beautiful, intelligent, and useful book about the sixteenth-century revolt. He sets the stage quickly with a thirty-page summary covering the main figures, turning points, historiography, and the works of the most important of its many chroniclers. Briefly, the teenage Charles I (later Charles V) arrived in Spain to take the Crown with his Flemish advisers and quickly convoked a meeting of the Cortes in Santiago to raise taxes before returning north to claim the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. The towns of Castile rebelled in May 1520 against the corrupt and now absentee monarchy. The comuneros organized local juntas along with a central junta, obtained the support of the imprisoned Queen Juana (Charles's mother), and raised a working army based on local militias. The rebellion took on increasingly radical tones and was defeated the following year. In subsequent chapters, Martínez describes the late medieval tradition of rebellion; the sorts of people who joined the revolt, who included artisans, peasants, lower nobility, and the clergy; as well as the history and memory of the comuneros in later centuries and their literary legacy.

Martínez's principal focus is language. The meanings, echoes, and use of words such as comunidad, novedad, república, revolución, junta, and democracia are what explain how this monumental event occurred in the first place and how it has been invoked again and again. The author also describes [End Page 445] how new physical configurations and practices worked to modify old words: "En las historias de los levantamientos populares, es frecuente encontrar que sus protagonistas históricos tientan las palabras, experimentan con viejos vocabularios y van abriendo camino a nuevas veredas de sentido. Hay momentos en los que se tensan las ideas y se ponen en juego nuevas formas de inteligibilidad. De repente, las injusticias que parecían naturales dejan de serlo, en gran medida, porque se habla de ellas de otra manera" (205). Martínez directly asks if we can even use today's words to describe events in the Old Regime, and concludes that, yes, we can. Without losing respect for the distance between us and them, one of the remarkable things about the comuneros is that their vocabulary was so similar to our own.

Comunidad is a rich and potent word. It spoke to townspeople's remembered and imagined past and also signaled danger for those in power, who throughout the early modern period warned of incipient comunidades surfacing out of discontent. Novedades also were dangerous and to be avoided; indeed any change, any alteración, was a bad thing. But at the same time, political writers of the era, whose language was, importantly, not unknown to common people, looked back to a time of libertades, even democracia, both of which figure in the documents Martínez uses and whose erosion, in the eyes of the rebels, was itself a novedad to be overturned. República signified a sort of community but also a series of institutions grounded in the past, whether real or otherwise.

One...