HISTORIC TOWNS ATLAS?
3. Provisional results
For now, the sources used in the database have been limited to the analysis of the three thousand assorted publications that constitute the current work of each and every one of the people studied, although this increases from day to day. On another level of information, internet searches have been carried out in order to ob-
tain curricular and biographical data available from the web pages of departments, repertoires of medieval studies and other similar resources. In the near future, the typology of sources will be extended, as far as possible, especially through direct in- terviews with the people concerned. The most important provisional results are the 212 prosopographical files on teachers from an official census from January 2003 from the universities website of the Ministry of Education. With regard to this, we have also checked the data on tenured teaching staff in other subjects, which can be consulted on the ministry’s website. To summarise, the main categories of our prosopographic database are the names of the teachers, their academic field, their university, the subject of their doctoral theses, the thesis supervisors and the year of completion. There are also other numerical fields and subfields for references to books, articles, talks, communications and other texts recorded for each person.
There were 46,950 tenured teaching staff in Spanish public universities at the time of the study (January 2003), divided into four categories, that is, 7,932 univer- sity professors (17 % of the total), 25,633 university lecturers (54 %), 2,271 higher education college professors (5 %), and 11,114 higher education college lecturers (24 %). The centres with the largest numbers of teachers were the Complutense University of Madrid (3,507 people) and the University of Barcelona (2,411). If we add up the number of teachers from all the universities in Madrid (Complutense, Autonónoma, Carlos III, UNED, Politécnica and Juan Carlos I) and Barcelona (Bar- celona, Autónoma, UOC, Politécnica de Catalunya and Pompeu Fabra) we can see that together they contain almost a third of the national total.
Of the 199 subjects taught in Spanish public universities, only 10 had over 650 teachers each: Applied Economics (1,440), Applied Mathematics (1,440), Applied Physics (1,200), Financial Economics and Accounting (1,079), English Philology (864), Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (775), Chemical Engineering (758), Nursing (732), Computer Languages and Systems (689), and Business Studies (666). Economics, mathematics and physics were the largest areas, three or four times larger than the areas of history, which were headed by Art History (536), Contemporary History (410), Modern History (255), Medieval History (212), Prehistory (172), American History (98), Archaeology (91) and Historiographical Sciences and Techniques (74). By way of example, the average number of teachers per area in Spanish public universities was around 236. As we have seen, this number is only exceeded by Art History, Contemporary or Modern History.
The subject of Medieval History comprised 141 men and 71 women (a third of the total and only 4 of them university professors). The average age was estimated at around fifty. The distribution by academic category was 45 university professors (21 % of the total) and 158 university lecturers (74 %), as well as 4 professors and 5 lecturers of higher education colleges (5 %). It was thus a teaching body assigned according to the nature of the degrees that were taught in the faculties of Philosophy and Arts, History or Humanities and, on very few occasions, in the old teacher training schools, now pre-school and primary education colleges. On the other hand, if we consider the field according to the number of posts, our database once again shows Madrid and Barcelona as the places with the highest concentration of
teaching staff, without counting the CSIC research personnel assigned to medieval studies in these cities and who are not included in this database. Apart from the departments in these two cities, among the forty departments with personnel in the assigned area, only Granada, Salamanca, Santiago de Compostela, Seville, Valencia, Valladolid and Saragossa had ten or more teachers. In other words, a quarter of departments contained more than half of all teachers.
Concerning the issue of thesis supervisors, we can identify up to three historio- graphical generations, the oldest of which are no longer active. We refer in first place to theses directed by José María Lacarra de Miguel (1907-1987), Emilio Sáez Sánchez (1917-1988), Álvaro Santamaría Arández (1917-2004), Juan Torres Fontes (1919), Salvador de Moxó Ortiz de Villajos (1921-1980), Eloy Benito Ruano (1921), Antonio Ubieto Arteta (1923-1990), Luis Suárez Fernández (1924), Ángel Juan Martín Duque (1926) or Manuel Riu Riu (1929). They supervised at least a third of the doctoral theses of all teaching staff prior to 1990. At the same time, a second generation of working thesis supervisors emerged, direct disciples of the previous generation, born around 1936-1946. These include José Luis Martín Rodríguez, José Ángel García de Cortázar Ruiz de Aguirre, Julio Valdeón Baruque, Miguel Án- gel Ladero Quesada, Manuel González Jiménez and Paulino Iradiel Murugarren, among others. Some of them have supervised over ten theses among the current functionary teaching staff, together adding another third to the total number of theses, the years of reading in this case concentrating on the period between 1980 and 1996. Finally, the third generation of younger supervisors, disciples of the latter constitutes the remaining third.
As a general observation, the themes of doctoral theses submitted by Spanish university teachers in medieval history focus mainly on analyses of cathedral chap- ters, councils and municipalities, noble lineages, monasteries, bishoprics and dio- ceses, military orders, royal administration, courts, municipal charters and domains.
There is evidently a predominance of institutional history and, to a lesser extent, of economic, social or cultural history. Studies of poverty, marginalisation, religious minorities, women’s history, mentalities or daily life have not received quantita- tively significant monographic treatment. However, if we turn our attention to the subjects and topics of books, articles, papers, communications and other material, the situation tends to balance itself out.
One of the phenomena that stands out when the high degree of historiographical productivity is observed is that of contracted research, consisting of accepting invita- tions to congresses, seminars or publications that have to be delivered in a relatively short time, which generates a type of accelerated research with rates of production often far from the trajectory of the authors, avid to meet their professional commit- ments in the short term. As a consequence, a lot, perhaps too much, is published in a very disorganised way, without general research programmes, without attention to the historiographical debates, or even with revisions or critical updates of one’s own material. This type of progress is thus accumulative and extensive, and biblio- graphical growth tends to diversify interests, and to saturate more in form of chaos than to group together themes and lines of research.
In conclusion, the twelve theses with which Alain Guerreau proclaims the imperatives that should guide the future of French medievalism in the 21st century can perhaps be applied as general reflections also in the Spanish case15. However, the question does not lie only in rethinking the sources that are used in the research, co- operating with other disciplines, or evaluating and arguing about the applicability of current interpretative models, among other questions, but rather, first and foremost, in knowing who is working on what, and how, because historiographical innovation is impossible without collective self-awareness of who we are and where we want to go from our dispersed workplaces. If this first step is not taken and the reflexive tradition persists, which does not identify trends with names and surnames, then it is likely that the flaw in the content will continue to undermine any attempt at change, and the future will continue to be uncertain. In this sense, the contents of that summer course organised by Flocel Sabaté and Joan Farré in Balaguer in 2002 about the new perspectives in Spanish medievalism16 have become an essential starting point for a continuing debate about the future of our subject within the new European setting of teaching and historical research.
15. Guerreau, Alain. L’avenir d’un passé incertain. Quelle histoire du Moyen Âge au XXIe siècle? Paris: éditions du Seuil, 2001.
16. Sabaté, Flocel; Farré, Joan, eds. Medievalisme: noves perspectives. Lleida: Pagès editors, 2003.