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• Comuneros. El rayo y la semilla (1520–1521) by Miguel Martínez
• Ruth MacKay

ON 23 APRIL 1978, busloads of leftists and activists and ordinary fairgoers from throughout Castile converged upon a large field outside the town of Villalar to memorialize an army of Castilian commoners that implausibly rose up against the monarchy in 1520 and a year later was crushed in the very expanse where we were gathered. Some two hundred thousand people waved Republican flags and flags of all the regions of Spain after forty years of prohibition, and they chanted "Castilla, entera, se siente comunera." They wore and traded pins with flags, they delivered endless speeches, played instruments and roasted sausages and danced and sang and ate and drank, and it went on all day. I was young and I had never heard of the comuneros. But I will never forget that day, when Juan Padilla rose from the dead and spoke to vast crowds of people still celebrating the demise of the Franco dictatorship.

Miguel Martínez has written a beautiful, intelligent, and useful book about the sixteenth-century revolt. He sets the stage quickly with a thirty-page summary covering the main figures, turning points, historiography, and the works of the most important of its many chroniclers. Briefly, the teenage Charles I (later Charles V) arrived in Spain to take the Crown with his Flemish advisers and quickly convoked a meeting of the Cortes in Santiago to raise taxes before returning north to claim the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. The towns of Castile rebelled in May 1520 against the corrupt and now absentee monarchy. The comuneros organized local juntas along with a central junta, obtained the support of the imprisoned Queen Juana (Charles's mother), and raised a working army based on local militias. The rebellion took on increasingly radical tones and was defeated the following year. In subsequent chapters, Martínez describes the late medieval tradition of rebellion; the sorts of people who joined the revolt, who included artisans, peasants, lower nobility, and the clergy; as well as the history and memory of the comuneros in later centuries and their literary legacy.

Martínez's principal focus is language. The meanings, echoes, and use of words such as comunidad, novedad, república, revolución, junta, and democracia are what explain how this monumental event occurred in the first place and how it has been invoked again and again. The author also describes [End Page 445] how new physical configurations and practices worked to modify old words: "En las historias de los levantamientos populares, es frecuente encontrar que sus protagonistas históricos tientan las palabras, experimentan con viejos vocabularios y van abriendo camino a nuevas veredas de sentido. Hay momentos en los que se tensan las ideas y se ponen en juego nuevas formas de inteligibilidad. De repente, las injusticias que parecían naturales dejan de serlo, en gran medida, porque se habla de ellas de otra manera" (205). Martínez directly asks if we can even use today's words to describe events in the Old Regime, and concludes that, yes, we can. Without losing respect for the distance between us and them, one of the remarkable things about the comuneros is that their vocabulary was so similar to our own.

Comunidad is a rich and potent word. It spoke to townspeople's remembered and imagined past and also signaled danger for those in power, who throughout the early modern period warned of incipient comunidades surfacing out of discontent. Novedades also were dangerous and to be avoided; indeed any change, any alteración, was a bad thing. But at the same time, political writers of the era, whose language was, importantly, not unknown to common people, looked back to a time of libertades, even democracia, both of which figure in the documents Martínez uses and whose erosion, in the eyes of the rebels, was itself a novedad to be overturned. República signified a sort of community but also a series of institutions grounded in the past, whether real or otherwise.

One...

 审阅者：

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  公社成员。米格尔·马丁内斯的《闪电和种子》（1520-1521）
•  露丝·麦凯

1978 年 4 月 23 日，满载来自卡斯蒂利亚各地的左翼分子、活动人士和普通集市观众的巴士聚集在维拉尔镇外的一大片场地上，纪念一支卡斯蒂利亚平民军队，这支军队于 1520 年令人难以置信地起义反抗君主制，一年后在西班牙被镇压。我们聚集的地方非常广阔。大约二十万人挥舞着共和国旗帜和四十年禁酒令后西班牙所有地区的旗帜，他们高呼“卡斯蒂利亚，进入，se siente comunera”。他们佩戴别针，交换旗帜，发表没完没了的演讲，演奏乐器，烤香肠，跳舞唱歌，吃吃喝喝，这样的活动持续了一整天。我当时还年轻，从未听说过“comuneros”。但我永远不会忘记那一天，胡安·帕迪拉从死里复活，向仍在庆祝佛朗哥独裁政权灭亡的广大群众发表讲话。

米格尔·马丁内斯写了一本关于十六世纪起义的美丽、智慧且有用的书。他用三十页的摘要迅速奠定了基础，涵盖了主要人物、转折点、史学以及众多编年史家中最重要的人的作品。简而言之，十几岁的查理一世（后来的查理五世）抵达西班牙，与他的佛兰德顾问一起夺取王位，并迅速在圣地亚哥召开议会会议以提高税收，然后返回北方夺取神圣罗马帝国的王位。 1520 年 5 月，卡斯蒂利亚城镇爆发叛乱，反抗腐败且现已缺席的君主政体。公社成员与中央军政府一起组织了地方军政府，获得了被监禁的胡安娜王后（查尔斯的母亲）的支持，并组建了一支以当地民兵为基础的工作军队。叛乱的语气越来越激进，并于次年被击败。在随后的章节中，马丁内斯描述了中世纪晚期的反叛传统。参加起义的人包括工匠、农民、下层贵族和神职人员；以及后来几个世纪的comuneros的历史和记忆以及他们的文学遗产。

马丁内斯的主要关注点是语言。社区、新颖、共和、革命、军政府和民主等词语的含义、呼应和使用解释了这一重大事件最初是如何发生的，以及它是如何被一次又一次地引用的。作者还描述了[完第445页]新的物理配置和实践如何修改旧词汇：“在民众起义的故事中，我们经常发现他们的历史主角诱惑词汇，尝试旧词汇，并为新词汇开辟道路。有时候，想法变得紧张，新的可理解性形式突然出现，在很大程度上，因为人们以不同的方式谈论它们，所以看起来很自然。 ）。马丁内斯直接询问我们是否可以使用今天的词语来描述旧政权中的事件，并得出结论：是的，我们可以。在不失去对我们和他们之间距离的尊重的情况下，这些公社的显着特点之一是他们的词汇与我们的词汇非常相似。

Comunidad 是一个丰富而有力的词。它讲述了城镇居民记忆和想象的过去，也向当权者发出了危险的信号，他们在整个现代早期警告说，早期的共同体会因不满而浮出水面。 Novedades 也很危险，需要避免。事实上，任何改变、任何改变都是一件坏事。但与此同时，那个时代的政治作家——重要的是，普通人对他们的语言并不陌生——回顾了自由甚至民主的时代，这两者都出现在马丁内斯使用的文件中，并且在在叛军眼中，这本身就是一个要被推翻的新事物。共和国象征着一种共同体，但也象征着一系列植根于过去的机构，无论是真实的还是其他的。

 一...