The Secret Life of Writing: People, Script, and Ideas in the Iberian Peninsula (900-1200)

This book examines writing as a socially embedded practice in the Iberian Peninsula c. 900–1200, grounded in the charter record of the north-west, Galicia and northern Portugal, where documentary density coexists with highly uneven survival and archival mediation.

Offering a coordinated method that brings medieval palaeography, diplomatic analysis, and social–historical interpretation into a single sequence of inquiry, the author demonstrates how descriptive observation is translated into historical claims and where inferential thresholds must be set. Alongside conceptual discussion, the book provides practical research tools: reusable analytical templates, worked examples, and a set of case studies designed to test the method under real conditions of transmission, selection, copying, and loss. These include rural parish documentary settings and focused monastic nuclei, with particular attention to mediated lay participation.

Written for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars, this book is also intended as a working reference for archivists, librarians, and heritage professionals.

Ainoa Castro Correa is Associate Professor in Medieval History at the University of Salamanca, Spain, teaching medieval palaeography, diplomatic history, and the social history of writing. Her research addresses early medieval scripts, documentary culture, and pragmatic literacy in early medieval Iberia.