Season 1, Episode 107

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Violant writes a letter of recommendation for the post of a vicar in Termens, a town near Lleida.

Today’s Document

• Subject: recommendation for a town vicarage
• Date: April 10, 1387
• Day of the Week: Wednesday
• Language: Catalan
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R1819 f94v
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Violant
• Recipients: Bishop of Lleida

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: as queen, it would be normal for Violant to intervene in ecclesiastical appointments by giving recommendations like this one for a vicar in a small town; what is not so clear is how much Violant herself would have been involved in a lower level posting or if one of her court officials managed this from beginning to end

• Contextualization: the Great Western Schism; social networks as a source of royal power; Lleida as a longtime component of the Crown of Aragon and a cultural center with its university, but Termens was a small town that perhaps had relatively little interaction with that center

• Corroboration: Episode 46 and Episode 48 also touched on the management of affairs in Lleida; other instances of the monarchs’ involvement in ecclesiastical postings were discussed in Episode 2 and several other episodes that can be found by using the tag ecclesiastical

• Close-Reading: line 6 includes the phrase ‘servidor del senyor Rey’ and this might be referring to Jacme de Beuda, the person being recommended in the letter, indicating a closer connection to the royal couple; this document contains a variation of Chi-Rho to abbreviate for Christ

What is this document doing?

• This document activates the queen’s social network even for a very small posting.
• The document appears to contain the typical formulas for speaking positively about a job candidate.

Questions

• Who was Jacme de Beuda and what had he done to deserve this recommendation?
• How much attention did Violant give to this particular appointment?
• Was the post of Termens vicar important to the Bishop of Lleida? Why or why not?
• Was there anything out of the ordinary about this document in regard to the usual process for recommendations for ecclesiastical posts?

AI Usage

ChatGPT was essential in helping me to figure out the toponym in this letter as Termens. This document was in the first register that I put through my OpenClaw agentic AI pipeline, so the result was not as helpful. However, the pattern recognition function of the LLM did produce a fairly useable summary of the document because it is so formulaic.

Bibliography

• Rollo-Koster, Joëlle, and Thomas M. Izbicki, eds. A Companion to the Great Western Schism (1378-1417). Brill, 2009.

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