Martes

The Internet situation at the Maisonnave has gone from bad to worse-- last night nothing would load in my browser at all, and it wasn't a problem with my contraseña.  Apologies again for the delay in posting the blog.

Day two at the Archives was considerably more encouraging!  Isn’t that always the way =D?

I started at the ADP today, but managed to get some work done in the morning before going.  At the ADP, I finally found what I spent a week trying to find last year: my clockmaking priest’s testimony on his own behalf.  He was summoned to Pamplona to answer for the charges against him.  Lu Ann and I were both thinking perhaps he might try to explain how clockmaking was one of the ways he served God or was part of his vocation.  Quite the opposite.

He argued, rather, that the entire thing had been blown way out of proportion.

He didn’t deny anything he was accused of prior to the 1693 visitation where he was first admonished to stop his side jobs.  But everything he was accused of in the current criminal trial (1699), was apeno la Verdad (“hardly the truth”).  Sometimes, he said, by way of “diversion” or “pastime,” he assisted in the house of a locksmith or gunsmith in his village and these people received his assistance graciosamente (thankfully).  In fact, he said, he was accompanied by various others in this “assistance,” both priests and laity.

As for actually doing the work himself, he said he had never done so after the 1693 visitation, and at most he had done was “to say the mode and form of making some pieces, providing an outline (or plan) for such work.”  He said he had never made profit (a key aspect of the charges against him), nor had he ever celebrated the holy sacrifice of the Mass with dirty hands, let alone blackened hands.  Finally, he insisted, he “had not caused the notoriety and scandal imputed to him.”

With regard to his interim appointment in the nearby town of Unzué, he corrected a detail of the charge against him that looked strange to me a year ago.  In the charges against him, it said that “he is so obsessed with the work of clockmaking, that in the two months he served as interim Abbad of Unzué, he built the town a tower clock.”  It seemed to me that a tower clock would take more than two months to build, or would at least take up all his time in those two months, leaving the clergy of Unzué without a chairman.  Sure enough, Don Antonio testified that he had served the town for almost a year (more than 11 months).  I was half-hoping for him to say, “It takes a long time to do such an intricate engineering job.”  But it was just another denial.  He said he had entered, on some occasions, the house of the town’s locksmith, but it was to visit the locksmith’s wife and son who were both sick (the son actually died of this illness) and on some occasions to divert himself in the “Torre de palomas” the locksmith had.  I’m not sure what he means by “Pigeon tower” or how one would have fun there, but I’ll follow that up tomorrow.

He didn’t make the clock in Unzué, he said, nor any part of it, even though he was contracted to do so by the town.  Francisco de Aguirre, a resident of the town, made the clock—Don Antonio provided him the plan.  This is hugely important, if it’s true.  Actually, it’s important regardless.

Don Antonio was denying doing any of the manual labor (the dishonorable part of the work) involved in clockmaking or these other various metalworking projects.  He “merely” designed them.  If this is true, it means he almost certainly had worked on actual clocks at some point, and may have done more work on the clocks in question than he was willing to admit.  But if he provided the plans for these “fabricaciones,” that means he had not only a tactile knowledge of clockmaking from sheer practice of handling a lot of clocks.  He had a theoretical knowledge of how clocks worked.  My clockmaking priest has fallen squarely into the categories of expertise that I’ve studied with Dr. Popper.  Don Antonio is distancing himself from techne (sheer muscle memory) and painting his knowledge more as praxis (experience mingled with reason) or episteme (pure theoretical knowledge).  These Greek terms were used by Aristotle to hierarchize knowledge, and had a profound impact on the European concept of knowledge and work.

At the AGN, my searches for gremios (guilds) have not been very successful.  However, my search for peritos (experts) and mecanico (mechanical work) has been more encouraging.  I found a case from the late sixteenth century in which two escribanos (secretaries or court-recorders) petition King Philip II to exclude a man from consideration for a job as a procurador (another court official) because of his background as a mechanical worker.  They further requested that the king issue a clear proclamation that those who do such work (carpentry, I believe, was this particular candidate’s profession), should never be considered for secretarial jobs in the royal service.  King Philip II did issue a proclamation in response to this request, but it’s rather difficult to read.  I’m going to get more out of it tomorrow.  From what I can tell, P-II agreed that workers of mechanical background should automatically be disqualified from consideration for important government jobs.

Tomorrow I’m going to try some searches for other words for experts and expertise (there are actually a LOT of words for experts, which I think is promising for expanding the corpus of the “history of expertise” to include Spain).

We’ll see what happens tomorrow.  We had some rain this evening, so it seemed like a good idea to have dinner at the hotel tonight.  Be advised.  If you order a “hamurguesa” in Navarre (or at least at this place), it’s more like a steak-sandwich.  No complaints here, but it was pretty heavy and I wasn’t even able to finish it!

More adventures await tomorrow, I’m sure.  

Don José Luis loaned me a volume on the Camino de Santiago today.  Upon learning that I’m Methodist (it came up when I asked about Ash Wednesday services at the Cathedral), he was kind enough to say that he “loves and respects everyone,” and that, as far as pilgrimages go, “the important thing is that they are done in reverence and honesty.”  I assured him that, if I ever found myself on the Camino (and I hope I will someday), I would carry plenty of both along with my pilgrim’s staff and my scallop shell =D.

Hasta luego,
-A