Season 1, Episode 95

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Violant orders Cresques Bonafos, a Jew of Figueres, to appear in response to a supplication that his wife made to the queen.

Today’s Document

• Subject: process for a wife’s petition to the queen about her husband
• Date: March 29, 1387
• Day of the Week: Friday
• Language: Latin
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R1822 f143v
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Violant
• Recipient: Cresques Bonafos, a Jew of Figueres

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: governance of the Jewish community of Figueres apparently fell within Violant’s portfolio as a queen lieutenant; when Bonafos’s wife petitioned the queen, she appealed to the highest legal authority available to her

• Contextualization: Jewish and Muslim communities in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon were governed directly by the king or queen; this led to the monarchs sometimes becoming involved in civil disputes between members of religious minority communities; Marie Kelleher has convincingly argued that women in the Crown of Aragon could leverage the legal system to their advantage and one of her illustrative examples is a Jewish woman named Bonadonamak

• Corroboration: this document makes an interesting comparison to the one examined in Episode 64 in which Violant entrusts a Jewish official with a high level of responsibility, illustrating levels of cooperation between Christian elites and Jews especially at the level of the royal family

• Close-Reading: Violant calls Bonafos’s wife ‘poor and miserable’ and this seems to indicate a level of sympathy for her; the date referred to in the body of the letter is connected to Quasimodo, also known as the Second Sunday of Easter

What is this document doing?

• This document connects the queen’s authority to an intervention in a marital dispute within a religious minority community.
• The document reinforces the direct governance relationship between the Jewish community of Figueres and the royal family of the Crown of Aragon.

Questions

• What was Cresques Bonafos’s wife’s complaint against him?
• What additional documents contained the information about the complaint?
• Did Violant sympathize with the wife in this situation?

AI Usage

In this episode, I explain the results of the first two attempts to use OpenClaw to automate my three-stage process for obtaining transcription and translation from Gemini and Claude. The first two registers came through without any results from Gemini, meaning they were transcriptions and translations from Claude alone. For the next attempt, OpenClaw has to slow down the submissions to Gemini, leaving 30 seconds between each one. For a 300-page register, that adds up and makes the overall processing time about 12 hours long. Also, I have found that the token cost for these operations is quite large, meaning that it will cost me about $50 or even $75 for each register.

For today’s document, I used Gemini for an initial transcription, which I then had Claude reconcile with its own initial transcription. The result, due to it being Latin and tough paleography, was so poor that I needed to produce my own transcription and provide that to Claude in Stage 2. Claude then produced a translation into English with footnotes.

Bibliography

• Catlos, Brian A. “Contexto y conveniencia en la Corona de Aragón: Propuesta de un modelo de interacción entre grupos etno-religiosos minoritarios y mayoritarios.” Revista d’història medieval 12 (for 2001-2002 2002): 259–68.
• Kelleher, Marie A. The Hungry City: A Year in the Life of Medieval Barcelona. Cornell University Press, 2024.
• Mollick, Ethan. Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Portfolio/Penguin, 2024.

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