Imperial Conviviality: What Medieval Spanish Legal Practice Can Teach Us about Colonial Latin America

Late medieval and early modern Iberian monarchs governed through a competitive delegation of certain forms of jurisdiction. They invited corporate groups, including frontier settlers and urban citizens, but also resident Muslims and Jews, or indigenous peoples of the Americas, to live under customary law that was legitimated under conditions of close interaction and cohabitation. This created a tense form of everyday conviviality, wherein group members were intimately knowledgeable about aspects of the laws of other groups onvivial relations thus produced legal markers of difference that could reflect the way that superior powers dominated, but subaltern actors could also use those differentiations strategically. The analytic of conviviality, as a way to focus on the ways that difference functioned within everyday life rather than acted solely as a barrier, reveals the ways that consensus had to be constantly renegotiated within multiple group dynamics rather than imposed or achieved.