From Heaven to Earth: The Reordering of Castilian Society, 1150-1350 [Hardcover]

I just got done reading this for an independent study on Medieval Spain, and I really enjoyed it. Although it is short (154 pages of actual text), the book packs in a lot of information. Ruiz concentrates mostly on primary sources, although he shows an impressive knowledge of secondary ones, and shows how Castilian society between 1150-1350 shifted to a more secular society (secular being relative). He chronicles how Castilians reexamined and defined how they thought of property, charity, kingship, spatial relationships to territory, the afterlife, genealogy, and material goods. If you are at all interested in Medieval Spain, or Medieval intellectual history, I would highly recommend this book. It will please both the serious scholar and the causual, but curious, reader.

This concise and well written book is a fine-grained examination of social change in Medieval Castile. Ruiz exploits an interesting trove of primary documents, particularly wills, to look at changes in attitudes towards property, family, salvation, and political power. In the 12th and 13th century, economic growth, fuelled in northern Castile by traffic along the pilgrimage route to Compostela and tribute from weakened Muslim states in the south, produced increasing urbanization and economic differentiation, attracting immigrants from north of the Pyrenees. Accompanying these trends were increasing long distance trade and monetarization of the economy. The wills show increasingly detailed bequests, primarily to family members, breaking a prior pattern of wholesale gifts to religious foundations, particularly monasteries. Bequests to church establishments increasingly specified services in return, masses and other forms of piety aimed at assisting the departed and other family members move through purgatory. Ruiz argues well that all these changes indicate an increasing concern with property, maintaining family wealth and lineages, and increasing importance of the laity in Medieval Castile. Legal and other documents were increasingly prepared by educated laymen in Castilian. The growth of towns and educated laity was accompanied by increasing power of the Castilian kings. Many of these changes were typical of the high Medieval period and some occurred somewhat earlier in other parts of Europe, though Ruiz points out that some changes, particularly the switch to the vernacular for official documents and centralization of Castile, occurred earlier in Castile. The general concept that Ruiz uses to describe these changes is laicization, a term introduced by his mentor, the great American medievalist Joseph Strayer. The increasing importance of the laity and their concerns is a basic feature of this period, which Ruiz captures in the title of this book.